Cheap Postage

by Joshua Leavitt

The matter may be presented in still another view. The government establishes a mail between two cities, say Boston and New York, which is supported by the avails of postage on letters. Then it proceeds to establish a mail between New York and Philadelphia, which is supported by the postage between those places. Now, how much will it cost the government to carry in addition, all the letters that go from Boston to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to Boston? Nothing. The contracts will not vary a dollar. In this manner, you may extend your mails from any point, wherever you find a route which will support itself, until you reach New Orleans or Little Rock, and it is as plain as the multiplication table, that it will cost the government no more to take an individual letter from Boston to Little Rock than it would to take the same letter from Boston to New York. The government is quite indifferent to what place you mail your letter, provided it be to a place which has a mail regularly running to it.

This brings us to the unproductive routes. An act was passed by the last Congress to establish mail routes in Oregon territory. An agent is appointed to superintend the business, at a salary of $1000 a year and his travelling expenses; contracts are made or to be made, mails carried, postmasters appointed and paid. This is doubtless a very proper and necessary thing, one which the government could not have omitted without a plain dereliction of duty. The honor and interest of the nation required that as soon as the title to the country was settled, our citizens who were resident there, and those who shall go to settle there, should enjoy the benefits of the mail. And as it was the nation's business to establish the mail, it was equally the nation's business to pay the expense. No man can show how it is just or reasonable, that the letters passing between Boston and New York should be taxed 150 per cent. to pay the expense of a mail to Oregon, on the pretext that the post-office must support itself.

A mail is run at regular periods to Eagle River, Wisconsin, for the accommodation of the persons employed about the copper mines on Lake Superior. Without questioning the certainty of the great things that are to be done there hereafter, it is no presumption to express the belief that the expenses of that mail are hardly paid by the postage on the letters now carried to and from Lake Superior. Nor, after making all due allowances for the liberal distribution of copper stock at the East, is it rational to believe that all the people who write letters here, are so directly interested as to make a tax upon letters the most equitable mode of assessing the expense.

During the debates in Congress on the act of 1844, an incident was related by Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky, to this effect. He said he was travelling in the mail stage somewhere in the State of Tennessee. At a time of day when he was tired and hungry, the stage turned off from the road a number of miles, to carry the mail to a certain post-office; it was night when they reached the office, the postmaster was roused with difficulty, who went through the formality of taking the mail pouch into his hand, and returned it to the driver, saying there was not a letter in it, and had not been for a month. I will [pg 028] not inquire whose letters ought to be taxed to sustain that mail route, but only remark, that whatever consideration caused its establishment, ought to carry the cost to the public treasury, and not throw it as a burden upon our letters.

The Postmaster-General, in his late report, says that “the weight and bulk of the mails, which add so greatly to the cost of transportation, and impede the progress of the mail, are attributable to the mass of printed matter daily forwarded from the principal cities in the Union to every part of the country;” and “justice requires that the expense of their transportation should be paid by the postage.” I would add to this the qualifying phrase, “or by the government, out of the public treasury,” and then ask why the same principle of justice is not as applicable to long mail routes as to heavy mail bags. There is and can be no ground of apprehension, that mails will ever be overloaded or retarded by the weight of paid letters they contain. It was found by the parliamentary committee, that the number of letters, which was then nearly fifty per cent. greater than in all our mails, might be increased twenty-four fold, without overloading the mails, and without any material addition to the contracts for carrying the mails. They also found that the whole cost of receiving, transporting and delivering a letter was 76-100ths of a penny, of which the transit cost but 19-100ths, and the receipt and delivery 57-100ths. The cost of transit, per letter, is of course reduced by the increase of correspondence.

I have dwelt so long on this part of the subject, because I find that here is the great difficulty in the application of the principles and results of the British system to our own country—ours is such a “great country,” and we have so many “magnificent distances.” But disposing as I have of the unproductive mail routes, and showing as I have, the injustice of taxing letters with the expense of any public burthens, this whole difficulty is removed, and it is made to appear that two cents is the highest proper rate of postage which the government can justly exact for letters, on the score either of a just equivalent for the service rendered, or of a tax imposed for the purposes of the government itself.

This is the conclusion to which the parliamentary committee were most intelligently and satisfactorily drawn—that “the principle of a uniform postage is founded on the facts, that the cost of distributing letters in the United Kingdom consists chiefly in the expenses incurred with reference to their receipt at and delivery from the office, and that the cost of transit along the mail roads is comparatively unimportant, and determined rather by the number of letters carried than the distance;” that “as the cost of conveyance per letter depends more on the number of letters carried than on the distance which they are conveyed, (the cost being frequently greater for distances of a few miles, than for distances of hundreds of miles,) the charge, if varied in proportion to the cost, ought to increase in the inverse ratio of the number of letters conveyed,” but it would be impossible to carry such a rule into practice, and therefore the committee were of opinion, that “the easiest practicable approach to a fair system, would be to charge a medium rate of postage between one post-office and another, whatever [pg 029] may be their distance.” And the committee were further of opinion, “that such an arrangement is highly desirable, not only on account of its abstract fairness, but because it would tend in a great degree to simplify and economize the business of the post-office.”

Waterston's Cyclopedia of Commerce says, “the fixing of a low rate flowed almost necessarily from the adoption of a uniform rate. It was besides essential to the stoppage of the private conveyance of letters. The post-office was thus to be restored to its ancient footing of an institution, whose primary object was public accommodation, not revenue.”

The adoption of this simple principle, of Uniform Cheap Postage, was a revolution in postal affairs. It may almost be called a revolution in the government, for it identified the policy of the government with the happiness of the people, more perfectly than any one measure that was ever adopted. It prepared the way for all other postal reforms, which are chiefly impracticable until this one is carried. We also can have franking abolished, as soon as cheap postage shall have given the franking privilege alike to all. We can have label stamps, and free delivery, and registry of letters, and reduced postage on newspapers, and whatever other improvement our national ingenuity may contrive, to the fullest extent of the people's wants, and the government's ability, just as soon as we can prevail upon the people to ask, and congress to grant, this one boon of Uniform Cheap Postage.

V. Franking.