THE express companies, the great daily papers that use the express service instead of the mails, and the railroad companies, are the enemies of cheap postage on weekly papers and tract and pamphlet periodicals. These interests, together with certain personal enemies of certain classes of literature, endeavor to create the impression that it is because of the low rate of postage on what is called "second-class mail matter" that there is an annual deficit in the Post-office Department. But all the reports, other than manufactured ones, go to prove that the deficits are the results of abuses of certain privileges and extortionate rates of mail transportation. Official testimony to this effect shows that dishonesty, rather than low postal rates,7is the cause of deficits in the department. Note the following from the Commoner: Testifying before the house Committee on Post-offices and Post Roads, Edwin C. Madden, third assistant postmaster-general, said that indiscriminate use of the government free-mail envelope by various executive departments of the government was one of the chief causes of the postal deficit. He said that typewriters, billiard tables, desks, chairs, lounges, carpets, book-cases, and heavy steel safes were sent on mail cars free at all times of the year, and that it happened that much of these heavy shipments were made during the period when the mails are weighed for ninety days in order to determine the basis of compensation to railroads. Mr. Madden said that in 1899 this government free matter, exclusive of bags and wrappings, constituted 12.58 per cent. of the entire weight carried. Postmaster General Cortelyou, he said, had estimated that in 1904 the government lost in round numbers $20,000,000 by this free matter. As this abuse is the work of senators and representatives, and persons to whom they transfer their privilege illegally, it is not to be expected that any remedy will come from Congress. And the government will go on paying the railroad companies eight times as much for carrying the mails as the express companies have to pay for a like service.