290 
THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
ful foliage and could no doubt be made to pay it grown 
in quantity for cut sprays. 
It is to the man who thinks, experiments and attempts 
that usually wins out, as soon as he proves a thing a suc¬ 
cess be will have many imitators. 
NURSERY AND SEED CATALOGUES SHOULD RE 
MAILED AT THE POUND RATE 
Extract From an Address By J. Horace McFarland Before 
a Recent Meeting of the Postmasters’ Association 
Held in Washington, D. C. 
The transportation of intelligence through the mails 
is admittedly the backbone of commerce as well as the 
bulwark of national safety. Each advance in transpor¬ 
tation has been eagerly availed of by the devoted men 
who have made the postoffice truly the arterial system 
of our national life, pulsing with the blood of a hundred 
million hearts. The fastest horses carried the mails until 
the faster railroad trains further speeded them. Our 
trans-Atlantic passenger service has depended less on 
passengers than on the mail bags to induce speed and 
certainty. Pneumatic tubes barely preceeded the use 
of automobile trucks for quickening the local handling 
of mails in the great cities. Wings have been added in 
the airplane mail service, now a commonplace thing to 
the postoffice, and when anything faster is invented, it 
will have a mail-bag on its tail very promptly. 
Perhaps the one greatest advance, the one most notable 
facilitation of the service, occurred when a pound rate 
was established for periodical publications, and the 
weight and stamp consideration was transferred from 
the single item to the full mail-bag. 
We have failed to advance at all, in the two genera¬ 
tions in which I have known the postoffice, in the legal 
and official regulation for handling the vast volume of 
printed mail included in the third class. So lar as the 
facility and expedition and accommodation to your busi¬ 
ness are concerned we are handling third-class matter in 
the era of the stage-coach, not that of the airplane. We 
still lick and stick stamps on most of the billion of circu¬ 
lars, catalogs, pamphlets and similar items, just as we 
did when the volume of it going through the postoffice 
in a year was hardly as great as that now most expen¬ 
sively, laborious and inconveniently handled in a day. 
WHY NOT A POUND RATE FOR THIRD-CLASS MATTER? 
Let me at once insist that this suggestion does not im¬ 
ply any reduction of the rate of postage now charged for 
third-class matter, nor does it propose to enter upon the 
question of zoning of such matter. I simply propose that 
we stop printing, storing, distributing, accounting for, 
selling, affixing and cancelling a large proportion of the 
stamps required to indicate postage prepayment on the 
vast volume of direct advertising matter daily through 
the mails, and that in so doing we stop penalizing the 
paper maker, the printer and the business world. Of 
course I refer only to such matter as brought to the post- 
office in definite quantities. Stamps would continue to 
be used for single and small mailing and for convenience. 
The present “permit” arrangement for the mailing of 
catalogs and other advertising or of the supplying under 
certain conditions of precancelled stamps are good as far 
as they go, but they do not go far enough, nor do they 
touch the basic injustice of the antiquated system which 
now handicaps business. 
It happens that I am closely familiar through a life¬ 
time of relationship with the seed and nursery trade of 
the country, which closely underlies the food we eat, so 
far as it grows in or from the fertile earth. Bread and 
potatoes, beans and corn, apples and oranges, and all 
the other vegetables and fruits, and indeed all the im¬ 
proved forage plants which support the sheep and cattle 
that supply the most of our animal foods, are grown from 
seeds or trees mostly purchased on catalog preentation. 
Tens of millions of these catalogs circulate by mail into 
and through every postoffice in the land. They relate to 
the cost of our food, for which they present the possi¬ 
bility of increasing the supply of it. If they cost more, 
that cost is quickly reflected in the loaf of bread, the 
price of potatoes. 
The law provides that matter of the third-class up to a 
certain weight limit placed when parcel post was estab¬ 
lished, shall be mailable if postage is prepaid by stamp 
affixed, at the cost of one cent for each two ounces or 
fraction thereof. In comparing postage rates for differ¬ 
ent classes, this is usually described at the rate of 8 centc 
per pound. Is it? Let us see. 
The advertising man usually plans his catalog in mul¬ 
tiples of 16 pages, and as any sort of catalog will run 
over two ounces, he either pays more for paper of a 
weight that will run to the next jump, or as is actually 
the practice, he pays a much higher rate than 8 cents 
per pound, because he must mail in two-ounce jumps. 
If the catalog, with the necessary inclosures and wrap¬ 
pers or envelopes, comes just inside the two-ounce limit 
and the paper maker (who usually refuses to guarantee 
accuracy within 5 per cent, for good manufacturing rea¬ 
sons) delivers paper even 3 per cent, heavier, or an un¬ 
certain quantity of printing ink multiplies beyond the 
calculated weight, hie catalog may be barely down 
weight when offered for mailing. The advertising man 
must, therefore, double his postage and pay 16 cents per 
pound, while the postoffice which handles the delivery of 
the catalog is put to a no greater expense. The unfortun¬ 
ate business man, not being able to afford $2000 as a 
transportation cost where $1000 had been calculated as 
the postage on 100,000 catalogs, trims off part of the cata¬ 
log pages, mutilating the work because of the penaliz¬ 
ing of the tw r o-ounce jump. He cannot afford to pay 8 
cents per pound for more than 3000 pounds of transporta¬ 
tion he does not get. 
Facing the cost of mailing averaging more than four 
times that charged the newspaper, the catalog is forced 
to sail close to the postal rock, the two-ounce jump. To 
avoid these rocks, as his business demands more space 
and pages for his message to his customer, he asks the 
paper maker for thinner paper. The paper maker re¬ 
sponds, increasing the per pound figure materially for 
the lighter weights, to print which the printer also 
charges more. 
But it may be said “of what concern to the postal 
authorities is this extra increase to the catalog maker?” 
Every man knows that the ultimate consumer pays for 
all these extra costs, and when they relate to the very 
food we eat, it is altogether in point for the Government 
to endeavor to reduce them. 
