A glance at freight schedules will show any reader that live stock, cattle, hogs or sheep, are carried from Chicago to New York, Boston or other eastern destination at only a small fraction of his dead-mail rate. Again, while double-deck live stock cars are in extensive use on long hauls, the stock is not corded up on the decks as much of the second-class mail is piled up. Not only that, but the live stock must be _watered and fed in transit_. The rail rates for the carriage of dead-freight makes Mr. Hitchcock’s 9.23 cents a pound, which he figured as the cost to the government of carriage and handling second-class mail, read so absurd as to be a joke, were the purpose and purport of his statement not so grave and serious as they are. Even the 4-cent rate that he and a coterie of his friends tried to put over in the Senate rider--$80.00 a ton for carrying dead weights the average mail haul, and dumping it off at destination--is a ridiculous charge. Why, the express companies are carrying hundreds of tons daily of dead-freight over such average haul for less than a cent a pound; yes, they are carrying tons of second-class _mail matter_ and carrying it _at one-half a cent a pound_. It has been cited by Mr. Hearst and other publishers that certain railroads carry second-class mail matter over fast freight runs for about one-quarter of a cent a pound. In this connection another thought presents itself: Did, or did not, Mr. Hitchcock, at the time he was pushing his “rider” in the Senate, have any adequate knowledge of the amount, of second-class mail matter which publishers were then sending by express and fast freight? If he had such knowledge, then he must have known of the fact that _thousands of tons_ of periodicals are now carried by the railroads and express companies at a rate _lower_ than the government’s mail charge of one-cent a pound. If Mr. Hitchcock had such knowledge when he was handing his string-talk to President Taft, having his “heart-to-hearts” with certain senators, I wonder if he intimated to them what must necessarily happen to the second class mail division and to that deficit which, apparently at least, has so continuously, likewise so effusively and diffusively, worried him?