Suppose you were the postmaster general of a small country. You received an annual salary equivalent to about $8,000 or $10,000 per year. Suppose too, that your august position required private schools for your children, maintaining a fine home, entertaining on a lavish scale and all the other burdens of prominence.

Unless you were independently wealthy with outside sources of income, isn’t it possible that you might be susceptible to promoters of controlled stamp issues who offered you an “honest” way to increase your income by a few thousand dollars a year?

Some of the flood of “new issues” is unquestionably a result of connivances which situations such as the above engender. I don’t think that this can be stopped at its source, but I do think that it would become far less profitable for its perpetrators if more American collectors used a little will power and rejected materials which the philatelic press has exposed as contrived rubbish.

Perhaps, as Mr. Barnum once pointed out, “there is a sucker born every minute.” Do you have to be one of them?