Talk of post-office-reform brings to my mind a conversation I had with Williams, who is a poet. It was about the time, some two years ago, when a Postmaster-General of the United States proposed the abolition of the second-class mail privilege for magazines.

I knew that Williams hates magazine editors with all the ardour of an unsuccessful poet's soul. Consequently, when he sat down and lighted one of my cigarettes and said that the magazines in their quarrel with the post office had overlooked the strongest argument on their side, I suspected irony. It is Williams's boast that he has one of the largest collections of rejected manuscripts in existence, the greater part being in an absolutely new and unread condition. Placed end to end, Williams once estimated, his unpublished verses would reach from Battery Park to the Hispanic Museum, at Broadway and One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street. Every poem in his collection has been declined at least once by every editor in the United States, and many of the longer poems have been declined two or three times by the same editor, and for totally opposite reasons.

It is not mere brute persistence on Williams's part that is responsible for this unparalleled literary accumulation. As a matter of fact he is easily discouraged, although, of course, like all poets he has his moments of exaltation. The trouble, he complains, is that with every printed rejection slip there comes a word of sincere encouragement from the editor. The editors are constantly telling Williams that his verse is among the very best that is now being produced, but that a sense of duty to their readers prevents them from printing it. They regret to find his poems unavailable, and earnestly advise him to keep on writing.

"You will recall," said Williams, "the principal point made by the periodical publishers. Conceding that their publications, as second-class mail matter, are carried at a loss, they argue that the post office is more than compensated by the volume of first-class mail sent out in response to magazine advertisements. The argument is sound, as I can testify from personal experience. Not long ago I came across a five-line 'ad' in agate which said, 'Are you earning less than you should? Write us.' Well, the question seemed to fit my case and I wrote. That was two cents to the credit of the post office. The post office sold another stamp when I received a reply asking me to send fifty cents in postage for instructions on how to double my income in three months. I was somewhat disappointed. With my income merely doubled I should still find it difficult to pay my landlady, but it was better than nothing. So I sent the fifty cents in stamps. You will recall the half-dollar."

"Oh, don't mention it," I said.

"Well, after a day or two I received in a penny envelope a paper-bound copy of 'How to Succeed,' being a baccalaureate address delivered by the Rev. Josiah K. Pebbles, who showed that honesty, thrift, and perseverance were the secrets underlying the career of Hannibal, Joan of Arc, John D. Rockefeller, and Theodore Roosevelt. So you see, by the time the secret had been conveyed to me the post office had sold stamps to the amount of fifty-five cents. Now assume that there are in the United States between forty and fifty thousand poets and other literary workers who would like to double their income, and it is plain that the United States Government made a very handsome profit on that five-line 'ad.'"

"But that is not what I started out to show," said Williams. "What the magazines have omitted to point out is that by rejecting every contribution at least once, the editors are doing more for Uncle Sam's first-class mail business than through their advertising pages. And the difference is this: While there must be a limit to the number of people who will answer an advertisement, there need be no limit to the number of times a manuscript is sent back. I can't see why the publishers and the Postmaster-General should be flying at each other's throat, when there's such a simple solution at hand. It is evident that there is no postal deficit, however large, which cannot be wiped out by a sharp increase in the average number of rejections per manuscript. Editors will only have to augment by, say, fifty per cent. the number of reasons why a contribution of exceptional merit is unavailable. My 'Echoes from Parnassus' was sent back thirty-seven times before it found a publisher. It would have been a simple matter to send the poem back a dozen times more either absolutely or with a word of hearty encouragement."

By this time I had made up my mind that it was indeed irony, and I was sorry. I don't mind when Williams gets quite angry and lashes out; but I hate to have a poet laugh at himself.

"Not that I can help feeling sorry for the editor chaps," he went on. "You couldn't help feeling sorry, could you, for a man who has been trained to recognise the very best in literature, and to send it back on the spot? And the more he likes it the quicker he sends it back. Frequently I have been on the point of writing to the man and telling him that if it is really such a wrench to return my poem to please not consider my feelings in the matter, but to go ahead and print it. What saves the editor, I imagine, is that after a while he does learn how to detect some real fault in a contribution which just enables him to send it back without altogether succumbing to grief. Of the fourteen men who rejected my 'Echoes from Parnassus,' one wrote that I reminded him of Milton, but that I lacked solemnity; another wrote that I reminded him of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but that I was a little too serious; another wrote that my verses had the Swinburnian rush, but were somewhat too fanciful. The editor who accepted the poem wrote that he couldn't quite catch the drift of it, but that he would take a chance on the stuff."

Here Williams got up and strode about the room and vowed that no combination of editors could prevent him from continuing to write poetry. "And I never refuse to meet them half way," he said rather inconsequentially. "I went into Smith's office yesterday with a bit of light verse and had him turn it down because it had the 'highbrow touch.' 'My boy,' he said, 'we must give the people what they want. For instance, I was going up to my apartment last night and the negro boy who runs the elevator was quite rude to me; he had been drinking. Now why couldn't you write a series of snappy verses on the troubles of the flat-dweller? This line you're on now won't go at all with my readers; they are not a very intelligent class, you know.' And that's another thing I can't understand: Why should every editor be anxious to prove that his subscribers are a bigger set of donkeys than any other editor in town can claim?"

"I was fool enough," Williams proceeded, "to reject Smith's suggestion. I should have accepted it. My poet's mission won't feed me. If President Eliot insists it is my mission to write stuff no editor will touch, he doesn't know what he is talking about."

"I don't think it was President Eliot," I said.

"Wasn't it? Say Plato or Carlyle, then. You can't go on for ever slapping us on the back and letting us starve. You have got to back up your highly laudatory statements by purchasing our wares or we shut up shop. We don't ask for champagne and truffles, but we do want a decent measure of substantial appreciation, all of us people with a mission, poets, artists, prophets, women. Now women, here comes Plato or Carlyle and says it is a woman's mission to have at least eight children."

"President Eliot said that," I interposed.

"Oh it was President Eliot? Eight children, says he, is her mission. But let me tell you if you take her children and pitch them into the waste basket, if you use them only to fill up your factories, and slums, and reformatories, woman will be chucking that sacred mission of hers through the window before President Eliot can say Jack Robinson. She is doing it now and serve them right. Mission! Rot!"

He seized a handful of my cigarettes and went out without saying good-morning.