The express companies of the United States

by Bertram Benedict

LACK OF REGULATION

During the sixty years from the inception of these private express companies in the United States to the dawn of the twentieth century, the rendering of this express service, of vital significance to the economic needs of the United States and of vital potential significance to the social needs of the people of the United States, was relegated without whimper to unchecked private agencies. Although the last thirty years of the nineteenth century saw the development of the United States into a complex and extensively specialized industrial mechanism—with a growing dependence of each geographical division of the country upon every other geographical division and of each economic unit upon every other economic unit—the country seems never to have suspected that it might well claim authority over so important a link in its industrial integration as the transportation and delivery of all merchandise too small or too valuable to be transferred and delivered as freight. There sprang into being during this period only some futile and spasmodic attempts at state regulation. By 1871, Germany had developed its remarkable Government express service, which later was classified into passenger and fast freight divisions, with corresponding variation in costs. In Great Britain, agitation for developing the express business as a part of the postal system had resulted in the establishment of a Government parcel-post as early as 1883. By 1892, the French Government was conducting an express business, selling the transportation of parcels both large and small to the French people without yielding profit to any owners of stocks and bonds, but imposing charges just high enough to meet the cost of the system; and developed, like our own rural free delivery, with an eye primarily to the service of the people, not to the profit-and-loss balance-sheet. But who were these countries that the United States could learn anything from them? The United States was the land of opportunity, and if gentlemen of affairs had been skilful enough to corral under their control the express business of the land, we most emphatically refused to thwart their opportunity for making the most of their foresight. We suggested jail for the agitator who insisted that the country owed the poor man a living, but the keystone of our economic creed was a faith that we owed the rich man a living. We weren't interested in what was serviceable as such to the people as a whole—we believed in the divine right of private enterprise of the economically capable. Were the express companies enforcing exorbitant rates? Private enterprise. Did they discriminate against certain shippers? Private enterprise. Did express profits represent a small amount of traffic at a high profit instead of a large amount of traffic at a low profit? The freedom of private enterprise. Was the cost of expressing a package unduly high because of the costliness of frequently transferring it into the hands of five separate companies? Private enterprise. Could the Government do the business more satisfactorily, more cheaply and more extensively, and thus reduce the cost of many commodities to their consumers? The holiness of and the necessity for the untramelled right of private enterprise.

Accordingly, it was not until 1890 that even any accurate and reliable figures of the quantity and quality of the express service of the country were available for purposes of mere study and investigation. Within the census of that year, the express companies happened to be included—a survey being made of their operations for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1890; and thus for the first time and after fifty years the American people were able to get some information on the operations of the private agencies to whom the express service of the land had been entrusted. It is true that the act of Congress authorizing the census of 1880 had contained a provision for the collection of statistics of the express companies, and that a schedule of inquiry directed toward that end had been formulated and distributed. Only two of the eighteen companies in existence, however, replied to it. The others maintained that the census law had no authority over their vested interests, and declined to make a report. The Census Office in 1880 actually reacted to this attitude by courteously abandoning its legally-authorized investigation, and contenting itself with publishing merely some information on the contracts between the express companies and the railroads. And, although the 1890 Census went so far as to publish the expenditures of the express companies, it very naively declined to report upon their receipts.