When the committee got together it was found that there was not a single proposition of any sort relating to second-class mail rates before it for consideration. Neither was there a written suggestion, recommendation or report bearing upon that subject before them. Mr. Hitchcock, however, was present at this committee meeting. He formulated his proposition and the committee went into session, the discussion being led by Senators Carter and Crane, who had become “convinced” against their best judgment if not against their will, in the forenoon of the same day, to support the amendment. The discussion lasted for several hours, with Mr. Hitchcock’s deficit occasionally buzzing as his wheels went round. Then the committee adjourned until the next afternoon, February 9th.
Mr. Hitchcock left the room after the discussion and, it is said, went immediately and reported to the President. Upon learning that the attitude of the committee was unfriendly, the President at once began to turn on more current, not hesitating to use his patronage club in doing so, reports say.
The committee met, as agreed at its adjournment. _Mr. Hitchcock was present with his rider amendment all written up and fully varnished and frescoed, and in two hours Mr. Hitchcock’s rider amendment was tacked onto the bill_, in wording substantially as it appears on another page.
Then the real fight began. Hitchcock stood to his embrazured guns, to his reprisal rider, throughout the entire engagement. As an evidence that it was his rider, or his and President Taft’s, I desire here to present to the reader points in proof:
That picked “discriminating” Senate committee had a majority of defeated or otherwise disgruntled politicians. They were defeated or disgruntled because certain independent periodicals had, figuratively speaking, peeled the varnish and smooth epidermis off them, thus exposing their decayed or decaying carcasses to a public not only able to read and understand, but a public _willing_ to read and understand.
I will offer a few other established facts. Mr. Hitchcock, during the closing days of the fight, _devoted nearly his entire time to pushing and advocating his measure, his carefully prepared scheme_. A canvass of the Senate was made, which canvass led Mr. Hitchcock to believe he had the votes to put his rider over the course a sure winner. In that, however, he was mistaken. A number of the Senators had wised up as to the real purpose and purport of that rider and, in the canvass, they _handed back to him a little of his own peculiar brand of jolly, which he had delivered to them in unbroken packages, freight prepaid_.