laws. I do not know how many publishers of country newspapers are now in the $4,000 class, but no doubt they all hope to be. Few, if any, publishers have earned any excess profits during the war, for the high prices of paper and of every other commodity used by them have tended rather to reduce profits below the peace scale.
The objection of publishers is not to paying their full share of war taxation, but to special taxes which are not levied on any other business, They protest most strenuously against a system of postal rates which in the pretense of exacting full payment for services rendered by the Post Office Department, would cripple, in fact destroy, the business of many publishers. They are ready to pay any part or all of their profits if necessary, to the Government in aid of the prosecution of the war, but they are not willing to submit to an impost which would ruin the business of many and to which no other industry is subject. If the present second class rate is too low, even when regarded as a feeder to other branches of the postal service, they are willing to submit to a reasonable increase, even greater than that proposed by the Senate committee, but they insist that this rate be uniform throughout the country and be a charge for service, not a tax, and most emphatically not a penalty for exercising the right of independent criticism which belongs to every free man.
There is ground for belief that the zone rates were intended as a punishment for those newspapers and periodicals which have upheld American rights during the war, which have called attention to the need of preparedness and which have condemned the supine indifference of Congress and of some executive officers of the Government to this need. This courageous course of the patriotic and wide awake American press has not been pleasing to those pseudo-statesmen who cried out for peace at any price and who are chagrined at defeat. That chagrin may explain the remark of one of the pacifist Senators to a delegation of publishers: "Don't you want to pay for your war?"
The best of all possible reasons for opposing special and unbearable exactions on the press is the desire of such men to cripple and stifle it. When the freedom of the press to discuss public affairs and to criticise the public acts of public men is attacked, all publishers of every class, whether they issue great metropolitan dailies or small village weeklies, have a common duty to rise up in defense. The duty is the greater because the attack 1s indirect, by men too cunning and cowardly to avow their true motive.
"Val" Hears His Number Click
Roberto S. Vallespin, Associated Press operator in the Eugene Guard office, narrowly missed the experience of copying with his A. P. report the number which carried to him the message that he had been drafted into Uncle Sam's great liberty army.
Mr. Vallespin, who is a naturalized citizen and sincerely patriotic, was able to do the next best thing, however—he heard the number clicked over the wire while he was sitting comfortably in the next room with his hands in his pockets, waiting. He had not yet finished his vacation, and the night A. P. operator was sitting in for him.
Suddenly "Val" pricked up his ears and commenced to pay close attention. "9-2-6" came the message.
"There it is," he said quietly. "They got me," However, he will not be taken in the first call, as Lane county's National Guard and volunteers more than supplied the quota of the county.
