SOME LITTLE RED SCHOOL HOUSE FIGURING.
Now, let us sit down on the veranda, bring out the little red school house slates and do some figuring on this railway pay problem, question, proposition, or whatever the “experts” may choose to call it.
First, there, on page 329 of the 1910 report, it states, “estimated” on the basis of those 1907 “special weighings,” that there were 873,412,077 pounds of second-class mail carried and handled.
Let’s see! Yes, of course, how simple it is. There’s that 1907 table of percentages, a page or so back.
As it was “figured out” in 1907 by the people who did the weighing, or who bossed it, we may consider it as dependable as the Third Assistant Postmaster General’s figures on page 329 of the department’s 1910 report.
The reader will please understand me. I do not mean to say that either the 1907 or 1910 reports are dependable.
I wish the reader to understand that I understand, or believe, them both to be merely guesses—guesses more or less mis-stitched in the knitting and more or less frazzled and threadbare by reason of long service.
But they are what we have to “figger” from.
Page 329 of the 1910 report says:
Total mailings (second-class), 873,412,077 pounds.
The 1907 tabulation of distributed mail weights (see table a few pages back) says that second-class mail, in carriage, is 36.39 per cent of the total mail weight.
Here’s where we put our slates into service.
We’ll first divide (look back at that 1907 table), 873,412,077 pounds by .3638—that being the percentage of second-class to the total of mail carried, as reported in the “special weighing” of 1907.
Well, .3638 into 873,412,077 gives us 2,400,802,850 pounds as the gross mail weight carriage in 1910.
That does not look near so large, nor so questionably peculiar, as does some other “answers” we are figuring out on our little red school-house slates.
Looking back to that 1907 tabulated estimate, we find that, of the total weight carried—and paid for as mail—.4308 of that total for which we patriotic, likewise confiding, kitchen-garden citizens pay is not mail at all.
A glance at that 1907 tabulation will show us that 43.08 per cent. of the total mail weight for which the government pays is for “equipment” and “empty equipment dispatched.”
Now let’s take our slates again and multiply that total weight 2,400,802,850 pounds by .4308. “Well, what’s your answer?”
One billion, thirty-four million, two hundred forty-five thousand, eight hundred and sixty-eight pounds!
Well, that’s some tonnage, is it not? Of course, as the reader will readily grab hold of, that tonnage is not, in itself, staged as a “feature” in this “ciphering.” This is a big country and its tonnages are big, whether of wheat, corn, pigs, fools, or mail. It is a “curtain” comparison we desire to have noticed and studied. Look at it, study it prayerfully, then put your thinker to work for about thirty seconds.
According to the Postoffice Department’s own figures and estimates, it appears that a total tonnage of 2,400,000,000 pounds (omitting the tail figures), were handled, and the cost of all paid for by this grand old government of ours.
Next, let us notice that 1,034,000,000 pounds (tail figures again omitted), was not mail at all—sacks, fixtures, etc., etc.
Now, look at it—the result.
Railroads were paid for carrying 2,400,000,000 pounds of mail.
Of that total weight 1,034,000,000 (nearly half) was “equipment” and “empty” equipment “dispatched.”
Beyond the showing of these figures, comment is scarcely necessary for anyone at all familiar with railway traffic methods and costs—whether the haulage is by slow or fast freight or by express—anyone will see the raid in it.
Look at that haulage of “equipment,” which the postoffice revenues pay for! Pay for as mail. Look it over, and over again and then sit up and do a little hard thinking.
Waters Pearse, of Pearseville, Texas, ships, say ten or twenty coops of chickens to Chicago. He may ship by express or by fast freight—the latter of course, if “Wat” and his friends have been able to make up a carload. “Wat” consigns his chickens to some Commission house in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago or elsewhere. Wherever our friend “Wat” of Pearceville, Texas, ships, or whether he ships by express or by fast freight, his empty coops will be returned to him without charge.
If Steve Gingham, in Southern Illinois—“Egypt”—has a hen range and his hens have been busy, Steve will have several cases of eggs to ship every week or ten days. Well, all Steve has to do is to take his cases of eggs over to the railroad station. Some express company will pick them up and take them to Chicago, to St. Louis, to Cincinnati, or other market. In a few days, about the time Steve gets the check for his eggs, he’ll find the cases on the station platform returned to him, without charge.
What we’ve said about our friends, Wat down in Texas, and Steve in “Egypt,” is equally true of any shipment of any sort of specially crated fruit or vegetables, of boxed, bucketed or canned fish, milk, etc., etc. The shipping cases, buckets, boxes or cans are returned to the shipper without charge. Yet here is this great government of ours paying the railways for nearly one ton of fixtures and equipment for every ton of mail (all classes), carried. Fixtures, equipment, etc., aggregated, in the weighing of 1907 (see tabulation a page or two back), 43.08 per cent of the total weight for which the government has paid mail-weight rates for four years—paid for hauling those racks, frames, sacks, etc., etc., back and forth over the rail-line haul every day of the four years.
Railroad people and their representatives have written voluminously, likewise fetchingly, to prove to an easily “bubbled” public that the government has been paying too little rather than too much for the rail carriage of its mails. I have read numerous such vestibuled productions. They were all good; top-branch verbiage and rhetoric, so smooth, noiseless and jarless in coupling that the uncritical reader’s sympathies are often aroused, and his conviction or belief enlisted by the sheer massive grandeur of the terminology used. Try almost any of these promotion railway mail-pay talkers and throw the belt on your own thought-mill while you read. Four times in five the ulterior-motive writer or speaker will have you rolling into the roundhouse or repair shop before you know you have even been coupled onto the train. When you emerge, if your thinker is still off its belt, you will find yourself about ready to “argue” that the railroads are very much underpaid, if, indeed, not grossly wronged by the government. I would like to quote some of the picture arguments from several of these railway studios but cannot. As illustrative of the general ensemble of these forensic art productions, I will, however, reproduce here a gem from one of them—a bit of verbal canvas so generic and homelike as to class as a bit of real genre.
The reader will find it in Pearson’s Magazine for June, 1911. Who personally perpetrated it, I know not, and the magazine sayeth not. The editor of Pearson’s, however, assures us that the article from which the following excerpt is made, was “prepared” by the authority and under the direction of the Committee on Railway Mail Pay, and as prominent members of said committee the editor gives the names of Julius Kruttschnitt, Director of Maintenance and Operation, Union and Southern Pacific Systems; Ralph Peters, President and General Manager, Long Island Railroad; Charles A. Wickersham, President and General Manager, Western Railway of Alabama; W. W. Baldwin, Vice-President, C. B. & Q. Railroad; Frank Barr, Third Vice-President and General Manager of the Boston and Maine Railroad.
That is certainly a representative quintette of railway artists and generally recognized as qualified to produce—verbally—almost anything in railway art, from a freehand tariff to a “car shortage” done in oil while the crops ought to be moving. Am sorry I cannot quote more extendedly. The following, however, will give the reader a sample of the “style” and also of the “argument” common to most of the protective and promotive railway word pictures:
If, as has been reported, a certain railroad president ever did utter the famous phrase attributed to him, “the public be damned,” the public has more than gotten even. It does the damning itself nowadays instead, and so effective is its verdict that we are even confronted with the spectacle of the government itself bowing to the popular prejudice irrespective of the facts in the case. Undoubtedly we have become a nation of stone-throwers. To a certain extent this has worked for the public benefit. Every deserved stone has worked for the correction of admitted evils. But so rapidly has the public taken to the lately discovered pastime of stone-throwing that it not infrequently uses its strength like a giant, and that, we have been told, is tyrannous. Let a corporation raise its head nowadays and it is greeted by a shower of stones of which perhaps not ten per cent. are intelligently cast. The only thing to do in such a case is to “duck;” argument becomes futile in the heat of battle.…
That is sufficient to show the “style.” The article then proceeds to give some mail-service history and to cite a few points wherein by “arbitrary” rulings the government is grievously wronging the railroads in under-paying them for the carrying of the mails. The following is one of the strong points or arguments presented:
Furthermore, the railroads hold that an additional injustice was done in this connection in the adoption of the present methods of determining the weights. In addition to the several reductions from the act of 1873 above mentioned, and in spite of the fact that various government committees admitted their injustice, a singular order amounting practically to a juggling of weights in favor of the government was issued under the date of June 7, 1907.
Under the date of March 2, 1907, the following order was issued:
“When the weight of mail is taken on the railway routes, the whole number of days the mails are weighed shall be used as a divisor for obtaining the weight per day.”
But under date of June 7, 1907, a surprising order was issued reading as follows:
“When the weight of mail is taken on railway routes, the whole number of days included in the weighing period should be used as a divisor for obtaining the average weight per day.”
Certainly this is a startling change of methods on the part of a government which has been attempting to establish a high standard of integrity in the conduct of all business. Slight as the difference in the wording of the two orders may seem upon a casual reading, the actual effect is drastic. Under the order of March 2, 1907, the total amount of mail weighed to obtain the average daily weight was to be divided by the total number of days on which it was handled. Surely there could be no other fairer basis of determining the average weight. But under date of June 7, 1907, the system of weighing was changed, so that to determine the daily average weight of mail the total weight should be divided, not by the number of days on which it was weighed, but by the whole number of days included in the weighing period irrespective of whether mails were handled daily during the whole period or not. As a matter of fact in many cases they were not, and this arbitrary “change of divisor,” as it is called, further reduced the pay of the railroads for the transportation of mails by about 12 per cent in addition to the reductions above mentioned which congressional committees had previously characterized as unfair.
There, now. Is not that profoundly and beautifully conclusive? The strictures, hard and unjust regulations and arbitrary impositions of the government in the matter of railway mail weights is working great wrong to the roads; is, in fact, so cutting into their earnings as to jeopardize their solvency or to force them to raise freight and passenger rates in order to continue business.
Very sad, very sad, indeed! And how unjust it is for the Postmaster General so to cut down railway mail pay as possibly to cut down the dividends the railroads have been paying the “widows and orphans” who own stock in the roads—stocks and bonds aggregating two or three times their tangible value. Especially wrong was it for the Postmaster General to issue and enforce such drastic orders after “congressional committees” had declared any reduction of the weight-pay rate “unfair.”
I shall not impose on the reader any extended discussion or consideration of the quoted bubble talk. A few comments I will make—comments which it is hoped will peel off sufficient of the rhetorical coloring to let the reader see at least enough of the real subject (the points involved), as will enable him to make a robust and correct guess at the “ground-plan” of both the sub and the superstructure the railway talkers and speakers are trying to erect.
First: Every right-minded citizen should—and when he rightly understands the matter, I believe, will—give the Postmaster General unstinted praise and commendation for the issuance and enforcement of the two orders which the railway men quote and complain about.
Second: The rail people say the last order (see quotation), “reduced the pay of the railroads by about 12 per cent.”
Without questioning the veracity of the gentlemen under whose “authority” that statement is made, The Man on the Ladder, as a judgmental precaution, shall line up with the folks “from Missouri” until that 12 per cent is set forth in fuller relief—until he is shown. The reader will observe that the railroad authorities quoted merely say that the “arbitrary change of divisor further reduced the pay of the railroads.” Whether or not the pay received by the roads before that order was issued was too low, low enough or too high is not directly stated by the writer or writers. That it is designed to have the reader draw the conclusion that the rate was low enough or too low before that second order was issued is made evident by the reference to the expressed opinions of “congressional committees”—opinions to the effect that the “reductions” forced by the first order were “unfair.”
Third: The names of many men of both ability and of integrity have appeared upon the rosters of the Committees on Postoffices and Postroads of both the Senate and the House during the past forty years. In face of that fact stands forth in bold relief a fact so bare and bald—and so suggestive of wrongs done and doing by the rail people—as to remove it from the field of serious debate. That fact is: For forty or more years the railroad men and allied interests have by lobbies, or other persuasive means, got the Congressional Committees (Senate, House and joint), to do about what they wanted done in the matter of rail carriage and pay for handling the mails, or to prevent the committees from doing things they did not want done.
Fourth: That “change of divisor,” covered in the order of June 27, 1907, and which these railroad men accuse of causing a shrinkage of 12 per cent in the mail-weight pay the roads were receiving under the order of March 2, 1907, and prior, possibly was based on some valid reasons or grounds, or upon grounds the then Postmaster General believed to be valid. I have not before me, at the moment, any written data or information as to the reasons assigned by the postal authorities for that “change of divisor”, or whether they assigned any reasons for the order making the change. I know, however, of one very good reason there was for making such a change on several railroads or divisions of roads.
The weighing of the mails was formerly made during a period of 90 to 105 days, or fifteen weeks, once every four years. The law now permits the Postoffice Department to make special weighings, I believe. On the average daily mail weight for those 105 days the postal department based its contract with the roads for carrying the mails for four years.
Now notice this: The terms of such contracts not only implied but specifically required a daily carriage of the mail weight for the number of days designated, allowing, of course, for wrecks, washouts and other unavoidable interruptions in the movements of trains.
Keeping that in mind, suppose the Postmaster General discovered that on a good many mail runs—“lines” or “half-lines”—suppose that the chief of the department discovered a condition on many mail runs similar to that I personally know to have existed on a few, in years 1907 and prior. That was, briefly stated, this:
The contract called for a daily carriage of so much mail weight and the government paid for that per diem carriage, the days of unavoidable interferences and interruptions included. Suppose that the postoffice authorities discovered that, by reason of the diversion of the mails to other lines, the daily mail service was not rendered; or discovered, as in at least one instance I discovered, that the contracting road (or roads) gave little consideration to the daily service clause save during the weighing period, dropping the mail from train—skipping a day’s service—whenever it was to their interests to do so, and often assigning the most flimsy reasons for so doing or assigning no reasons at all?
That order of June 7, 1907, would have a tendency to stop that sort of disrespect and abuse of contract stipulations, would it not?
Fifth: The writer of the article from which we have quoted appears to have got himself somewhat twisted in his consideration of that order of March 2, 1907. It seems that (see first paragraph of quotation) he would have the reader class it among those several forced reductions which “various government committees” had called unjust. But, further along, it is stated that “surely there could be no other fairer basis of determining the average weight” than that furnished in that order of March 2.
I wonder why the railroad lobby so strenuously opposed that order of March, 1907—connived and schemed for its rescinding, until the order of June 7, 1907, gave the gang of corruptionists something still more objectionable to the interests they served? Yes, I wonder why they so hotly opposed that order of March 2? If there could be “no other fairer basis of determining the average weight” in June, 1911 (the publication date of the article from which we have quoted), why was it not fair in March, 1907? And why was it not a fair and just basis for arriving at the average daily mail weights for many weighing periods prior to 1907? Did anyone ever hear any railway man advocating the “fair basis” provided in that order of March? Most certainly The Man on the Ladder never heard of such advocacy. The railway people did not advocate such a “fair” method of ascertaining the average daily mail weight their roads carried during a period of fifteen weeks—or during any other period—because they were beneficiaries of some very unfair methods and practices which gave them pay for mail weights their roads did not carry.
As I refer later to some of the practices indulged in the weighing periods, I will here mention only a method used for years prior to the issuance of that order in March, 1907—a method of arriving at the “average daily weight” for the carriage of which the railroad was to be paid for a period of four years. That method was, though I have been unable to learn that it was ever officially authorized by the Postoffice Department, to find the daily average for each week covered in the weighing period and then arrive at the average for the whole period by dividing the sum of the weekly averages by the number of weeks in which the mail was weighed.
Nothing wrong with that is there? Should work out fair and square, should it not? Well, it did not. The method was all right in theory and in letter, but a crooked practice was worked into its application—worked into it by collusion between crooked railway and public officials. And the crookedness of the practice was very plain and bold and bald. It was what in street parlance would be called “raw.” Here it is in figures:
Take a “heavy” mail line. Say the total mail weight for a week was, using a round figure, 840,000 pounds or 420 tons. Now dividing that total by 7, the number of days in a week and the number of days also on which the mail was weighed, would give a daily average of 120,000 pounds, or 60 tons. That is all clear and straight, is it not? Most certainly it is.
But the crooked application of the method divided the week’s total by 6 instead of by 7—divided the total of seven days’ weights by six. The railway people, you see, were great respecters of the Sabbath. They would run trains on Sunday to accommodate the public and to meet the necessities of their business, which was, and is, perfectly proper. They would also carry the mails for your Uncle Sam, which was also right and proper. But their lofty respect for the Holy Sabbath, or the high esteem in which they held our much loved and much abused Uncle, was such as induced them to hold up said Uncle as a respecter of the Sabbath, or seventh day, while they “held him up” in averaging his mail weights.
In the illustrative example we have put on the slate, the “hold up” would amount to—let’s see: 840,000 pounds, or 420 tons, divided by 6 gives us 70 tons as the daily average for the week, instead of 60 tons, as the actual average was. That is a “hold up” for pay for ten tons a day—for 10 tons not carried.
“What did the hold-up amount to in cash?”
Yes, it might be well to follow our hypothetical or illustrative example to its cash terminal. Well, that is easily and quickly done.
The rate of pay per ton mile per year on daily weights above 2½ tons is $21.37.[16] That ten tons added to the daily average would give to the railroads, then, just $213.70 in unearned cash each day.
If the contract stood for full four years on such false average, the railroad would pull down just 1,460 times $213.70 of unearned money or a total of $312,002 in the four years.
I would, of course, not have the reader understand that our hypothetical example would fit all railroads. Many, in fact most, of the mail-carrying roads average in mail weight much below sixty tons per day—even below ten tons per day. Some roads were and are paid for an average above sixty tons. Nor would I have the reader understand that the crooked practice just mentioned was common to all mail-carrying roads. There were possibly—yes, probably, some exceptions—some roads that carried so little mail as not to make a steal of a sixth of its weight-pay worth while.
I would, however, have the reader understand that I mean to assert that most of the mail-carrying roads were parties to the crooked method here described and that the hypothetical figures here given applied, proportionally, to any average per diem weight of mail covered in the carriage contract, whether it was one ton or a hundred tons.
I would also have the reader understand me to assert that, so far as information has reached me, no railroad man, or man representing the rail mail-carrying interests, ever questioned the “fairness” of the crooked practice just described—a practice which looted the government of millions of dollars.
As a raider into postal revenues, this thieving practice, it must be admitted, deserves conspicuous mention—more extended notice than I have given it.