“The Postmaster General had not been idle in the matter. He had it on his mind. Moreover, his party had been defeated at the polls in the previous November and about the only Republicans who were successful were Progressive Republicans against whom the President had admitted, in his famous Norton-Iowa letter, he had been discriminating and for whom Mr. Hitchcock had no sympathy. The policies, and in many cases the individuals, in the progressive movement had had large support from the magazines and periodicals; and before that, the reactionaries who had ultimately been defeated, had been assailed because of their misdeeds.” There is a lot of bone and sinew in that. Of course, both the President and his Postmaster General wanted to make good; wanted, as I have previously intimated, to get rid of those pestiferous independent periodicals which had been so conspicuous and powerful in unhorsing some of their stand-pat friends in the elections of November. Mr. Hitchcock is not one of the sort of men who rush in where angels fear to tread. He is quite a general. He can make the waiting tactics of General McClellan, it would seem, apply beautifully to a political maneuver. He can wait and bide his time. At any rate, he waited. He waited until the President and other friends had worked that announced method of “discriminating” against the progressives, the so-called “insurgents,” to the end of appointing a Senate Committee on Postoffices and Postroads, the personnel of which suited Mr. Hitchcock’s quietly nursed purpose--in fact suited him as well as if he had selected the committee himself. Mr. Hitchcock, however, still waited, and while he waited, the House Committee had been appointed and was engaged in considering the postoffice appropriation bill. This House Committee held numerous sessions and gave hearings to many newspapermen and to publishers of periodicals. It went over the entire field of requirement in the government postal services and appears to have gone into the subject of second-class mail rates and the cost of its transportation and handling most carefully and thoroughly. The result of its deliberations was to tender to the House a bill carrying, as previously stated, an appropriation of some $258,000,000 for the year’s salaries, maintenance and operation of the Postoffice Department, a sum which must certainly appear liberal to any informed reader. In this connection, two points stand out in bold relief. First:--When the House bill covering the 1911 appropriations for the Postoffice Department was passed and advanced to the Senate, _it carried no provision or recommendation for an increase of the second-class postage rates_.