Further Thoughts on Parcels Post pp. 3-5.
Charles W. Burrows.
Postmaster-General Meyer in an address to the New England Postmasters’ Association, Boston, October, 1907, and elsewhere, made recommendations urging legislation giving to the Postal Department a greatly extended parcels carrying service. The recommendations made were mainly two.
First. That the present rate of sixteen cents per pound for the mail carriage of merchandise with a weight limit of four pounds per parcel as the maximum shall be changed, reducing the rate to twelve cents per pound (with fractions at rates from one cent up) and increasing the weight limit to eleven pounds. The recommendation was that this should be, like the letter charge, a flat rate to prevail anywhere within the United States and its possessions irrespective of distance or accessibility.
In support of this, his first proposition, he calls attention to certain inconsistencies now existing in the service. He states that an individual entering any post office in the country with a parcel weighing four pounds, addressed to New York city will be obliged to pay sixty-four cents for its carriage by post. If on the other hand it is to pass through New York city to any one of the thirty-three foreign countries with which we have postal conventions, the charge will be but forty-eight cents. Further, should the package weigh more than four pounds, it will be denied admission to the mails in this country while it will be accepted and forwarded to any of these foreign lands if it weighs up to four pounds six ounces, and in the case of some, twenty-four of the countries it will be accepted even if it weighs so much as eleven pounds, and it is on account of these inconsistencies that he urges his legislation.
Let us first examine this point. General Meyer is quite correct in his statement that it does cost more to send, for example, a pair of shoes weighing just four pounds from Brockton, Massachusetts, to New York city, than it would cost to send the same pair of shoes through New York city to any one of the thirty-three foreign countries with which we have postal conventions.
General Meyer, however, fails to state that while there is this large number of foreign countries with which we have postal conventions, yet not a single one of the twenty-four countries with which we have an eleven-pound convention is on the map of Europe. They are all of the nature of Jamaica, the Windward Isles, Venezuela, Barbados, Costa Rica, Danish West Indies, etc., countries with which we do not do any great volume of business.
It may further be stated that the weight limit with the remaining nine countries, most of which are European, is in reality intended to be the nearest approximation to our own domestic four-pound limit, that is, it is two kilograms—about four pounds six ounces—and the European countries all closely scrutinize this weight limit as the business is one that involves a loss in its operation. Germany, for example, for a number of years recognized an eleven-pound limit but changed to the two kilograms about three years ago.
It should be borne in mind, moreover, that the exchange of parcels between these countries and our own is made as a matter of comity or international courtesy, and is permitted because the amount involved is small. The work is done, too, in connection with the carriage of first-class mail which produces a large profit.
To illustrate this matter, Great Britain carried in her parcels post last year 104,819,000 parcels. Of these only 2,575,000 (less than 2½ per cent) went out of the country to all foreign countries, her own colonial dependencies included, and to the United States she sent only 61,000 and we sent to her 89,000 only. The difference which is after all what we make or lose upon, was some 28,000, and that was but a fraction of a tenth of 1 per cent of the whole business. With some of the other countries in question, we exchanged less than 1,000 parcels in the last fiscal year, and with one of them it was less than 100, while with all of them aggregated it was a total of but 330,000 parcels dispatched and 181,000 received; so when we examine this question of inconsistencies microscopically we find that it is truly of microscopic proportion only, and may be disregarded as having no important bearing upon the general question.