Court Opinion

ID: 9418453
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:25:59.042392+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:15:47.007348
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
I have had the advantage of reading the judgment of my brother Brandéis in this case and I agree in súbstance with his view. At first it seemed to me that if a publisher should announce in terms that he proposed to print treason and should demand a second-class rate it must be that the Postmaster General would have authority *437to refuse it. But reflection has convinced me that I was wrong. The question of the rate has nothing to do with the question whether the matter is mailable, and I am satisfied that the Postmaster cannot determine in advance that a certain newspaper is going to be non-mailable and on that ground deny to it not the use of the mails but the raté of postage that the statute says shall be charged.
Of course the Postmaster may deny or revoke the second-class rate to a publication that does not comply with the conditions attached to it by statute, but as my brother Brandéis has pointed out, the conditions attached to the second-class rate by the statute cannot be made to justify the Postmaster’s action except by a quibble. On the other hand the regulation of the right to use the mails by the Espionage Act has no peculiarities as a war measure but is similar to that in earlier cases, such as obscene, documents. Papers that violate the act are declared non-mailable and the use of the mails for the transmission of them is made criminal. But the only power given to the Postmaster is to refrain from forwarding the papers when received and to return them to the senders. Act of June 15, 1917, c. 30, Title XII, 40 Stat. 217, 230. Act of May 16, 1918, c. 75, 40 Stat. 553, 554. He could not issue a general order that a certain newspaper should not be carried because he thought it likely or certain that it would contain treasonable or obscene talk. The United States may give, up the Post Office when it .sees fit, but while it carries it on the use of the mails is almost as much a part of free, speech as the right to use our tongues, and it would take very strong language to convince me that Congress ever intended to give such a practically despotic power to any one man., There is no pretence that it has done so. Therefore I do not consider the limits of its constitutional power.
To refuse the second-class rate to a newspaper is to make its circulation impossible and has all the effect of *438the order that I have supposed. I repeat. When I observe that the only powers expressly given to. the Postmaster General to prevent the carriage of unlawful matter of the present kind are to stop and to return papers already existing and posted, when I notice that the conditions expressly attached to the second-class rate look only to wholly different matters, and when I consider the ease with which the power claimed by the Postmaster could be used to interfere with very sacred rights, I am of opinion that the refusal to allow the relator the rate to, which it was entitled whenever its newspaper was carried, on the ground that the paper ought not to be carried at all, was unjustified by statute and was a serious attack upon liberties that not even the war induced Congress to infringe.