I have discussed this second-class mail rate--the cent-a-pound rate for periodicals--elsewhere. With private companies (the express companies) carrying and delivering second-class mail matter for the average mail haul, at _one-half cent a pound_ (and standing for a “split” with the railroads for one-half of that), the question as to whether or not the government _can_ carry mail matter without loss at _one cent a pound_, is not worth debating among men whose brains are not worn in their sub-cellars. I mean the last statement to apply to third and fourth class matter as well as to second. What it has cost the government, or what it now costs the government, to transport, handle and distribute the mails is another and quite different matter from what such service can be and _should_ be rendered for. Was it not that the people’s money is lavishly wasted by such foolishness and foolery, a dignified commission of three or six men sagely deliberating upon, critically “investigating” and laboredly discussing what it costs the government--what the government in 1908 or any other year paid--to carry and distribute the mails, might be staged as the working model of a joke. If a Commission’s time and the people’s money were spent in making a careful, thorough investigation as to what it _should_ cost to collect, transport, handle and distribute the mails, and as to just where and how the millions of dollars, now annually wasted in an over-unmanned, incompetently managed, raided and raiding service, could be saved, results fully warranting the expenditures made on account of these postal-investigating commissions would readily be obtained. A summary of the proceedings of the Hughes Commission is presented elsewhere. Here I shall take space for only two or three observations. First, as is evidenced by the Commission’s report, the Postoffice Department was before it in conspicuous volubility and the frequency of a stock ticker during a raid, with call money at 84. Postmaster General Hitchcock and his Second and Third Assistants appear to have been the chief “floor representatives” of the department during the flurry. Of 201 “Exhibits” listed by the Commission, about 100 of them--reports, documents, memoranda and letters--found origin if not paternity in the Postoffice Department, and a considerable portion of them was already on file in government archives. Of the sixteen papers submitted after close of “Hearings,” fourteen or fifteen are letters and memoranda of the department, besides which seven memoranda are mentioned as having been received from “the Postoffice Department and not marked as exhibits.”