cting on members of the Republican party. Moreover,
the department's most drastic recommendations have been directed not
against second-class matter as a whole, but against the periodicals; and
they have been made under the guise of preventing, as contrary to the
intent of the statute, the dissemination at the second-class rate of
vast quantities of advertising matter. Thus, the department has
recommended that that portion of periodicals which consisted solely of
advertising matter should be charged at a higher rate than the rest of
the publication (which would be allowed the second-class rate), while
nothing at all was proposed as regards ordinary newspapers, a
discrimination which cut the publishers of the periodicals deeply.

The representations of the Post Office department, extending over some
twenty years, and of most decisive and emphatic character, have not yet
succeeded in obtaining legislation for the reform of the second-class
mail scheme; but some few years back the department arrived at the
conclusion that the authority of the existing law was sufficient to
enable the more flagrant abuses to be checked, if not eliminated. A
series of rulings were thereupon promulgated, and by this means some of
the worst abuses have been removed, such as, for example, the
transmission as second-class matter of "libraries," issued as
periodicals. These rulings were resented by the publishing interests,
with whom it was a source of great complaint that the interpretation of
the statute defining second-class mail matter was left to arbitrary
decision by officials of the department.[349] The intense feeling in
America against any sort of bureaucracy, and especially against a
bureaucracy of the central Government, leads to a natural jealousy of
the exercise of this power, and as a remedy the suggestion was advanced
that provision should be made, first, for questions of the
interpretation of the Act to be decided in the first instance by a
permanent Commission located at Washington, on which the publishers
should be represented; and secondly, that there should be an appeal from
the decisions of this Commission to the ordinary courts of justice.

The department admits that its position with regard to the
interpretation of the statutes is unsatisfactory. Under the existing
system, all manner of questions are asked regarding the private business
of the publisher, and the decisions from Washington are often
delayed.[350] But as agai