EXPRESS COMPANIES CONDUCTING A CRIMINAL TRAFFIC.
But, says another apologist for the loose, wasteful methods of the Postoffice Department in handling both its service and its revenues, “The postal service was originally instituted for handling the government mail only.”
That be as it may, though I doubt the sweeping assertion of the statement made, just as I doubt the integrity and truthfulness of purpose of the person making it. It came to my notice as part of an argument (?) in defense of the outrageous railway mail pay and mail-car rental charges which mail carrying railroads have been permitted to collect from the postal revenues paid by the people. But whether or not the postal service was originally intended to be merely a dispatch service for transmission of government orders, documents, etc., can stand as no valid reason now for the Federal Government’s permitting its several departments to use and abuse the vast system for intercommunication among the people which it has permitted to be built up, and for the building of which it has taxed (by way of postal charges) those who made use of the system—taxed them excessively, if indeed not somewhat unscrupulously—whether or not, not, I say, the government originally intended the mail service to be an exclusive service for use of the government only has no present bearing. If such was the original intention, the foolishness of it must soon have become apparent, for we find that federal laws were enacted to establish a general postal service for all the people. Not only were laws enacted for the establishment and regulation of a mail service, but by the law of 1845 it was clearly intended to make such service a government monopoly. Section 181 of the federal statutes reads as follows:
Whoever shall establish any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets, or in any manner cause or provide for the conveyance of the same by regular trips or at stated periods over any post route which is or may be established by law, or from any city, town or place between which the mail is regularly carried, or whoever shall aid or assist therein, shall be fined not more than $500, or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
The foregoing makes it quite evident that, as early as 1845 at least, this government of ours did not intend or design the service on mail routes then existing, nor on routes to be established, was to confine itself to the carriage and handling of government matter only. The establishment of rail post routes and the greater facility and speed with which such routes would handle the people’s mails—“the letters, packages and parcels of people residing along such mail routes”—was one of the stock arguments of the Illinois Central Railroad promoters in 1849-50—an argument designed to justify before the people a grant of land to the chartered company so large as to make the grant a colossal steal. The same or similar argument was turned loose and persuasively paraded in the oratorical procession which preceded the vast federal land grants, or land steals, in connection with the building of transcontinental or Pacific rail lines.
Enough has been said to show quite conclusively that whatever may or may not have been the “intention” of the government at the first establishment of a mail service—a service then wholly by water transportation, by runners and by a “Pony Post” and mail coach—a decision was very soon reached to make the postal service a public one—a service for all our people—and to give the government a monopoly of that service.
No one reading the section of the Revised Statutes of the United States above quoted will attempt to controvert the statement last made.
Then, it may be asked again, and justly, too, why does the government continue to permit its various departments to over-load and to loot the postal service, the revenues for maintaining which the people—the mail-using portion of the people—alone contribute?
It also may be justly asked, why does the government permit its postoffice and other officials to scream at the people about “deficits,” when they have already paid far more than the service—their service—costs the government?
Other equally pertinent questions might be asked, but I shall forbear. I have shown, I believe, that the raids upon the postoffice revenues by free-in-county matter and by government itself would more than meet any “deficit” yodled about in recent years.
That is what I started to demonstrate in this chapter. But there are other raids and raiders upon the revenues of the Postoffice Department to which I must advert. I purposed in writing to this phase of our general subject, to make official prattle about postal service “deficits” look and sound foolish.
I believe I have already done that, but in justice to the subject and to the postal ratepayers, at least three other raiders must have their cloaks slit.
CHAPTER XI.
LATEST OFFICIAL STYLES IN POSTAL CONVERSATION.
The President’s message of February 22, 1912, reached me a few hours after the closing chapters of this volume had gone to the printers. With it arrived a copy of the Postmaster General’s report for the year ending June 30, 1911; also notice from a Congressman friend that he will have the Hughes Commission’s report on the way shortly. The Man on the Ladder, like Lucy, when selecting her spring bonnet, desires the “very latest creation.” It may not be essentially necessary in a discussion of Federal postal affairs, but even a hurried reading of the President’s message and the report of Postmaster General Hitchcock will furnish abundant evidence that expressed official opinion is somewhat ephemeral and transitory, like the styles in ladies’ headwear. I have never had the pleasure of retaining a lady’s unanimous friendship for any appreciable length of time after giving her my honest opinion of the style of her most recently acquired bonnet, and readers who have followed me thus far in my consideration of government postal affairs will have discovered that my respect for “style” in official oratory and literature needs coaching.
All that aside, however, the point is that I have persuaded my printers to “break galley” just here and permit the insertion of a chapter, having as subject the “very latest” in official postal affairs.