FOOTNOTES
[6] Mr. Hitchcock, it should be noted, is careful in giving the higher per cent. of rate which the third and fourth classes show above the second class rate. Beyond the bare statement that the expense of handling second class matter “is less” than for other classes, he says nothing of cost of carriage and handling. His own figures show (see preceding paragraph), that the cost of carriage and handling first-class matter is 422 per cent. higher than his own absurd cost-figure of 9 cents a pound (cost) for carriage and handling second-class and 4600 per cent. higher than the present second class rate.
[7] Mr. Suter must certainly have been wind-jamming a little. “Every man, woman and child” pays at a maximum rate of 2 cents an ounce or fraction thereof. That is at the rate of 32 cents a pound. Mr. Hitchcock’s figures assert, that it costs “47 cents a pound” to carry and handle the letters for “every man, woman and child”—that is, presuming they all write letters. The letter writers, it appears then, pay only 2 cents for a service which costs nearly 3 cents.
CHAPTER X.
POSTAL DEFICITS.
Now, let us look into and over that postoffice “deficit,” to the origin of which the memory of man scarcely runneth back, and which Mr. Hitchcock, by some strenuous effort on right lines readily converted into a surplus—a $6,000,000 deficit into some hundreds of thousands of dollars surplus. The returns are not all in yet. At any rate the Postmaster General has not announced them loud enough for The Man on the Ladder to hear, or he was in his physician’s hands when the announcement was made.
However that may be, Mr. Hitchcock has proved quite conclusively that there is no deficit—or, at least, no valid reason for one under present conditions.
And here, again, I desire to say that our present Postmaster General is deserving the praise or commendation of every American citizen for having demonstrated, by a few economies here and a few betterments there in the operation of his department, that the service can be rendered, and rendered efficiently, with an expenditure safely within the bounds of the department’s receipts or revenues.
Especially is Mr. Hitchcock deserving of commendation for this demonstration, because in making it he has done what so many of his predecessors talked of as desirable, but failed to do.
But with full acknowledgment of the splendid effort Mr. Hitchcock has made in converting a postal deficit of $6,000,000 in 1909-10 into a surplus for the year 1910-11, I desire to discuss, briefly, postal department deficits of the past—or the future—and the origin and cause of them.
In the future pages of this volume little if any reference will be made to our vigorous Postmaster General’s attempt to put onto the Senate course a rider that would run down certain periodicals which were to him and certain of his friends, as it would appear, of obstructive if not offensive character. It is possible, if, indeed, not probable, that I may, in this somewhat hurried discussion of our Postoffice Department deficits and their sources, cause and origin, repeat something, in whole or in part, that I have said elsewhere in this volume.
The discussion of the postal deficits leads us into the Raider factor or feature of our general title—into a consideration of the political, partisan and business influences and interests which have for thirty-five or more years been conspicuously—yes, brazenly—looting the revenues of the department. I shall not be able to advert to all such influences, interests and persons. Especially can I not mention some of the persons. Many of them have gone to “their reward”—or to their punishment—as the Almighty has seen fit to assign them. As a matter of venerable custom and of current conventional courtesy we must leave them to His justice—to our silence. One by one many of the dishonestly enriched from our postal revenues have dropped into “the dead past,” which Christ instructed should be left to “bury its dead.” In our treatment of this subject we shall obey the Master’s instruction—we shall discuss methods, practices, and acts, not men.
In turning to our subject directly, I desire to make a few positive statements or declarations.
1. The Postoffice Department is a public service department—a department intended to serve all the people all the time.
2. The people are paying, have paid, and are willing to pay, for their postal service.
3. The people do not care—never have cared—whether the expenditures exceed the receipts by $6,000,000 or $100,000,000, if they get the service for the money expended.
In comment on the last, I wish here to ask if anyone has heard much loud noise from the people about the army and the navy expenditures—expenditures larger than that of any other nation on earth for similar purposes?
Yet, for twenty or more years, the people have paid the appropriations for—also met the “deficit” bills of—each of those departments without any noticeable “holler.”
But, again, it must be pertinently asked, what have the people received in return for their billions of expenditures for those two departments?
Yes, what? They have had the doubtful “glory” of having their army debauch some island possessions, maneuver for local entertainments and do some society stunts while on “post leave”—which “leave”, for epauletted military officers, appears to have occupied most of their time.
And the people have put up, ungrumblingly, $100,000,000 to $150,000,000 or more (I forget the figures), for a navy—a navy carrying on its payrolls more “shore leave” men and clerks than it has service men. (At any rate that was the showing in a recent year). For this vast expenditure of their money the people got—got what?
Well, for their hundreds of millions expenditure on that navy of ours, the people, to date, have received in return newspaper reports of numerous magazine and gun explosions with, of course, a list of the killed and wounded, and reports of “blow-hole” or otherwise faulted armor plate, turrets, etc., of raising “The Maine,” of shoaling this, that or the other battleship, or of “sparring” or “lightering” off, to the music that is made by a “blow-in” of fifty thousand to two or three hundred thousand more of their money.
Reader, if you read—if you have read—the “news”—the periodical literature—of those past twenty years, you will know that the people have received little or no returns for the vast expenditure of money—of their money—that their representatives (?) have made for the Navy Department.
Oh, yes, I remember that our army and navy fought to a “victorious” conclusion the “Spanish American” war.
No patriotic American citizen alive at the time that war occurred will ever forget it. He will ever remember Siboney, Camp Thomas, Camp Wycoff, and the cattle-ship transports for diseased and dying soldiers. He will also remember the “embalmed beef” and the “decayed tack” and other contracts and contractors.
If the patriotic citizen has been an “old soldier,” or is familiar with the history of wars, he will also know that, if the whole land fighting of that Spanish American war was corralled into one action that action would be infinitely less sanguine than was the action at a number of “skirmishes” in our civil war—that, if the several naval actions of that war were merged into one, it would not equal, in either gore or naval glory, Farragut’s capture of Mobile, the action in Hampton Roads, nor even Perry’s scrimmage on Lake Erie in 1813.
What has all this to do with the postal department deficit, some one may ask? It has just this to do with it:
If a people stand unmurmuringly for the expenditure of billions for a service that yields them no return, save a protection they have not needed and of doubtful security if needed, that people is not going to raise any noisy hubbub over a dinky deficit of a few millions a year for a service which should serve them every day of every year.
I have expanded a little, not disgressed, in writing to my statement numbered 3. I will now proceed with my premeditated statements. Some of them may be a little frigid, but none of them are cold-storage. Some one may have told it all to you before, but that is his fault, not mine. He merely beat me to the facts.
4. As stated in a forward page of this volume, the people of this nation want and demand service of its Postoffice Department. They care not to the extent of a halloween pea-shooter whether the service is rendered at a deficit of six million or at a surplus of ten million, if service is rendered for the money expended.
5. The people of this country will object more strenuously against a surplus in their postal revenues—their service tax—than they ever have or will object to a deficit in the revenues of that service, if they get the service.
6. The Postoffice Department is not understood—is not even thought of by intelligent citizens—as a revenue-producing department. It is understood to be a service department, and the citizen—His Majesty, the American Citizen—is always willing to pay for services rendered.
7. The Postoffice Department has not in the period named—no, not for thirty or thirty-five years—rendered the citizen the service for which he paid.
I mean by that, of course, that the citizen has been compelled to pay far more for a postal service than he should have paid for that service.
8. Had that service been honestly, faithfully and efficiently rendered, the price the citizen has paid for it would have left no deficit for any year within the past thirty.
9. The only deficits in those thirty or thirty-five years have been the result of manipulated bookkeeping, of political trenching into the revenues of the department, of loose methods in its management, of disinterest in the enforcement of even loose methods, and of downright lootage and stealings.
“Rather harsh that, is it not?” asks one.
“Mere assertion,” says another
To the first I need only say that this is an age not congenial to milk-poultice talk. I have previously expressed my opinion on that point. If you have a thing to say, say it hard. The majority of people will then understand you. Those who do not understand you can continue their milk poultices—or believe and talk as they are told or are paid to believe and talk.
The latter—the reader who yodles that my preceding nine statements appear to be assertions only—can make a courteous and, possibly, a profitable use of an hour’s leisure in reading a few following pages, before he rusts into the belief that those nine “assertions” are groundless assertions.
In showing that there is no “deficit”—a shortage of receipts in the Postoffice Department over its legitimate expenditures—I shall not take my nine statements up seriatim, but present my reasons in a general way for having made such blunt declarations. I may go about that, too, in an awkward way, but the reader who follows me will get my reasons for making those nine declarations.