Possibly I am in error here, but when Senators and Congressmen who have studied for years the methods of handling business in the Postoffice Department were--and are--convinced that it is impossible for the most expert accountants to collect and collate _dependable_ information, relating either to any of its divisions of service or to the department in general; when old and tried students of the loose, wasteful methods of this department, of its utter lack of business system, yes, of its _crooks_ and _crookedness_--when, I say, such experienced students frankly and bluntly state their complete inability to gather any dependable data as to the business done by Mr. Hitchcock’s department, I am in doubt as to the correctness, or lack of correctness, in my previous intimation that Mr. Hitchcock is ignorant of his departmental affairs and practices, as well as of matters pertaining to periodical publication and distribution. Mr. Hitchcock has been at the head of his department something like three years, I believe. He has talked so much and written so much about postal “deficits,” about the cause of those deficits and how to remedy them by holding up periodical publishers, that, maybe, he has learned more about his department, more about deficits and the cause of them--learned more about these things in _three years_ than older and more experienced men have learned in ten years--yes, twenty. Maybe he has. If so, then I was in error when I intimated that his ignorance extended to departmental matters as well as to periodical publishing. If, however, I was in error as to Mr. Hitchcock’s knowledge of his departmental matters, I find myself in a multitudinous and _growing_ company of intelligent and informed people to whom he will have to talk and write much more, and to talk and write far more eloquently, persuasively and _wisely_ than he has thus far talked and written, to convince them that he has accumulated more departmental wisdom in three years than numerous older students of the subject gathered in ten. What training or opportunity Mr. Hitchcock had, previous to his installation in his present position, to qualify him for the office--training and opportunity which enabled him to grasp so comprehensively, as he would have it appear, the duties, functions, faults in accounting, _frailties_ in the service personnel,--in short, all the essentials of knowledge and information pertaining to a competent administration of the department, general, divisional and in detail, I do not know.