That is just what his move to cut the mail rate on first-class, or sealed, matter must lead to--lead to temporarily of course. In the end a one-cent rate per ounce or fraction thereof will win to a paying basis. That rate will mean a cut of sixteen cents a pound from thirty-two cents a pound for carriage and handling letters and other sealed matter of the first-class. Certainly the postoffice can haul and distribute such matter at a profit at that rate. However, it is equally certain that the department will not handle such matter at a profit for two, three or more years--not so handle it until numerous causes of waste, inhering in the department for years, are sloughed and the department put under _strict business management_, and not left under partisan political management as now and as it has been for thirty-five or forty years. With the postal and post card facilities now furnished at the one-cent rate, no considerable number of our people are complaining about the two-cent rate for letters and other sealed matter. But all will welcome a flat rate of one cent on such matter at the present weights. If they get it, either with or without Mr. Hitchcock’s assistance, the people will be getting only what they are entitled to, deficit or no deficit. However, if Mr. Hitchcock thinks a “deficit” necessary armament in his fight to increase second-class mail rates--to increase such rates, as it would appear, on a certain few periodicals which print and publish _what the people want to hear and read and not what a few federal officeholders tell them to print and publish_, then a cut of 50 per cent in the present first-class postage rates will most certainly create that deficit for him. In a few years, of course, after business has adjusted itself to the lower rate and the fathers, mothers and sweethearts of the country have learned that they can write a letter to John, Mary, Thomas or Lucy and have it delivered for one cent, whereas it now costs two cents, then Mr. Hitchcock’s _created_ deficit will fade away--will again fade into a surplus. In the meantime, however, Mr. Hitchcock and associate coterie who apparently are gunning for periodicals _which dare tell the truth_, will have a “deficit” to use as wadding in their verbal, oratorical and _franked_ ordnance.