Postmaster-General Hitchcock sat immediately behind Senator Penrose when this happened. He had been on the floor of the Senate most of that afternoon, and a great portion of the time for several days previous when the discussion of the postoffice bill seemed imminent. When Senator Penrose withdrew the amendment, the Postmaster General’s strenuously urged plan to use the taxing power of the government to make himself a censor, with almost unlimited power to declare what magazine and what periodical should be taxed and what magazine and what periodical should not be taxed; to give himself the sole determining power to decide what is a newspaper and what is a periodical--his long conceived plan, perfected quietly, put into preliminary execution without warning to those concerned, to be jammed through if possible, failed and failed utterly. Mr. Blythe also refers to the fight Postmaster General Hitchcock put up against _investigation_. Here I desire to quote him at some length: The Postmaster General had enlisted the President. He had put it up to the Republicans on the Senate Postoffice committee as an _Administration measure_ to be supported by administration men. He got the President to use the same argument. He contrived an amendment, after much labor, so drawn as to give _him the greatest_ powers of discretion in the application of the increase in second-class postage. He had the regulation of the magazine and periodical press of this country in his own hands, he thought; and he was preparing to regulate it according to his ideas--when he met with a sudden check. It was a good scheme, a far-reaching scheme, but it didn’t go through. The Postmaster General, being a small-bore politician, took a small-bore view of the situation. He underestimated the force of public opinion.