This condition, governing, as I personally know it does govern, furnishes my chief reason for saying that the Postoffice Department does _not_ know--does not know even approximately--the tonnage of the “free in county” matter it handles. It never has known and does not _now_ know, within _millions_ of pounds, the weight of such matter it carries and distributes. Again, I ask, why is this vast burden thrown onto the department and the department getting not a cent of either pay or credit for carrying it? Is it because of a paternal feeling our federal government has for the poor, benighted farmers of the country? I can scarcely believe it is. The farmers of this country are neither poor nor are they benighted. If they were, free carriage and distribution to them of these local sheets has not enriched them to any appreciable extent, however much such free carriage and delivery may have added to the bank accounts of the publishers of such periodical literature. Besides, ninety-five in every hundred farmers whose names are on the publishers’ subscription books _pay their subscriptions_. They usually pay, too, a pretty stiff rate--$1.50 or $2.00 for a “weekly,” which gives them mostly borrowed news and much of it decidedly stale at that. If a beneficent government grants its “free in county” postal regulation with a view to dissipating the gloom which clogs the garrets of our “benighted farmers,” that government misses its purpose on two essential points. Our farmers, as previously intimated, are no more benighted than are the residents of our villages, towns and cities, and even if their ignorance was as dense as a “practical” politician’s conscience, the medium which the Government delivers to them, carriage free, seldom contributes much enlightenment. No, it was not for either the enrichment or the enlightenment of the dear farmer that the present “free in county” postal regulation was made operative. It was to give some local party henchman a fairly profitable job as publisher of a county newspaper--a party newspaper--and to have, in him, a county “heeler” who would divide his time between building the party fences and telling the dear farmer how to vote. It is due to the publishers of country newspapers to say, that hundreds of them have grown away from rigid party ties--have grown independent. It is also but just to say that as these publishers have grown independent of party domination, their newspapers have improved. We have now many most excellent country papers published in our “down state” cities and larger towns.