OCR Text |
Show Government Discrimination. j. There is no question but the .ruling of the post office deparc- ment with reference to . the rights of printed matter to the parcel post rates is working an ; injustice to the country ; newspaper news-paper publishers, many of whom also conduct a job printing business. bus-iness. There is no fairness in 'the ruling of some third, or fourth, or fifth'assistant in the postmaster general's office, who feels his oats and wants us co know he is there. There is no justice in denying deny-ing service by parcel post to any product made up in whole or in part of printed matter. Letter heads, bill heads, auction j bills and the like are 'products' of the job department of a 'printing office, and yet they cannot go by parcel post, but must be sent at the old rate oi postage. The government don't j refuse to carry Limburger cheese or sauerkraut, which is but the product of a different kind of establishment, at parcel post rates. When the end man at a minstrel show said he saw a goat without a nose, the interlocutrix in-terlocutrix told him he must have made a mistake, and asked if this was the case, how the goat smelled; to which he replied re-plied 'it smeiled something awful.' aw-ful.' This is the case of the Limburger cheese, and yet a chunk of it can go by parcel post, when a package of nic clean paper is denied the privilege pri-vilege because a man's name and business is r.eatly printed in one corner. This office has been soaked several times for packages of noteheads, billheads etc., sent to nearby towns which would have gone all right for less than half the price if it had been cheese or a hunk of liver. It maybe that discrinination of this kind is all right but we can't see it. There is something radically wrong with the ruling that prohibits pro-hibits a publisher from running anything regarding a lottery when the government itself runs nothing more or less than lot- wj . v t iiiuu ivt teries in parceling out land. The government land office is the only place in the United States where lotteries can be lawfully conducted. It is a queer state of things. The post office department is so particular particu-lar in its ban upon lotteries of every name and nature that money known to be sent for the purchase of a ticket can be confiscated, con-fiscated, and a newspaper that runs an advertisement for one is forbidden the use of the mails and its owner can be heavily fined and imprisoned. More than that, a newspaper is denied de-nied the privilege, under penalty, penal-ty, of announcing the names of the lucky ones in a drawing contest con-test of any kind, whether local or general. There may be a distinction between drawing: a number from a box for a farm and drawing one for a prize worth a few dollars in a' local contest but most people can't realize it. |