As has been seen, the increases in express rates since the birth of the American Railway Express have been absorbed in wage increases. Now, in a statistical study, the phrase "wage increases" will connote a mere item of expense, but to the wage-worker it will connote happiness. It means more nourishing food; it means more wholesome dwelling conditions; it means more schooling for the children; it means more recreation; it means more medical care and less illness; it means especially less gnawing fear of what the morrow may hold. The example of the Railroad Administration indicates the widespread services in lessening want or even in increasing comforts which Government control brings in its wake—the raising of all wages to that level below which a decent standard of living cannot be maintained and the abolition of artificial and undemocratic special wage privileges of sex or color in favor of equal pay for equal work. A country which hitches its wagon to a world made safe for democracy can ill afford in any of its industrial activities underpaid workers, and least of all in any of its public utilities. If a Government Postal Express should be compelled to devote all its savings over the private express system only to wage increases among the thousands of men and women express employees, instead of being able to devote some or most of them to lowering the rates, the inauguration of a Governmental Postal Express would be still more than justified.
INADEQUACIES
Nevertheless, the advantages of the present system over the old are not sufficient. A large majority of the 25,000,000 persons served by the rural postal delivery are still without express service. There is still little opportunity for the direct transmission of foodstuffs from the producer to the consumer which at the present time presents the most hopeful method of attacking the soaring cost of food. There is still much potential and helpful express business which has not been called into being, and there is accordingly a considerable lowering in the rates which has not yet been effected. There is still no possibility of coordinating postal facilities with express facilities. There is still no change in the method of remunerating the railroads, and hence in the unscientific and discriminating methods of fixing rates. In a word, if this study may be said to have proved anything, it has proved that the express service belongs to the Post Office Department, not to the Railroad Administration; indeed, one can hardly avoid the deduction that the present war-time express system could have been adopted only from considerations of either temporary political expediency or of transient personal efficiency; or else of inattention to the true nature of the problem presented.
THE LARGER ISSUE
But material gains may not be the summum bonum of the express business. The express service is much more than an important business undertaking, and it is much more even than a valuable agent in quickening the industrial activities of the United States—it is, or rather it can be, one of the most serviceable media for the development of an American culture as that culture expresses itself in the economic processes of the nation. The future of the nation's express service is basically a problem of national morale. In the decades before April 6, 1917, there was no United States esprit, no United States national life, no United States unity. There were only separatist esprits; there was only class life; there was only geographical unity. The war found us an unintegrated miscellany, and our Government a creature strangely and even desirably aloof from the thoughts and aspirations of our daily lives. And now, almost overnight, sacrifice in France and at home has welded us into one people. Shall we remain one, or shall we revert to factions, to factions either at loggerheads with one another, or else indifferent one to the other? Assuredly we shall soon re-degenerate into warring factions unless our still largely inchoate strivings for national unity can discover vehicles to carry them forward. A Government which has become truly a people's Government will long continue in the United States only as it draws unto itself and maintains both the material and the immaterial agencies which dive down to the depths of our national daily existence and bind us together. More powerfully than any other of these forces, our vast public utilities can, as an integral part of the Government, retain our Government as the hub of our universe. And although of all the public utilities the railroads undoubtedly present the most hopeful source of this re-vitalization of our national life, yet a Government express service can also help in no small degree, both in itself and as a sharer in the entire general urge towards a democratically-socialized state, to preserve and even to invigorate the national morale.
And the future of the express service concerns not only national morale, but also individual morale. Aside from a few serviceable and hitherto usually unappreciated social servants, whether in private or in public bodies, success in America has lain along the lines of private enterprise for private gain. For the first time, a widespread summons for service to the people has been able during the nineteen months of war to supplant in the hearts of our most capable administrators the summons to exploitation of the people. For nineteen months they have subordinated self and enthroned society. Shall we send them back to the limbo of self-aggrandizement or shall we carve out new paths for the development of character in our American citizens? For obviously the decades immediately at hand are to witness also a direct growth of the control of the workers over their industry, whether it be private or public industry. Who can hope to measure the gain in individual morale when a man realizes that his own advancement depends upon the extent to which he can serve others, not upon the extent to which he can serve himself; when such a public utility as the express companies is in the hands of administrators who have turned their attention away from endeavors to derive as high rates as possible from the public to endeavors to charge the public as low a rate as possible? If we hope to keep unnarrowed, and even to broaden, the present fields in which opportunity is given our fellow-citizens to devote their lives primarily to their fellows' service rather than primarily to their own gain, any national activity as socially-necessary and as nationally-significant as the express companies must inevitably revert in ownership to the nation to whose needs it ministers, and the men and women within the machinery of its operation must serve owners who are not a handful of individuals, but the people, all the people who make up America.