Now, I have always had the idea that it was one of my rights to sign a petition; that no man in this country could grow so great that I had not the right just to hand the gentleman a paper with my opinion on it. Do you know I do not think anybody can get so big that an American citizen cannot send a letter to him if he pays the postage, and in that letter he can give him his opinion. There is no fraud about that; not the slightest. These men all out through the mountains, men that went out there, you know, to hunt for silver and for gold, live in little camps of not more than twenty or thirty, maybe, but they wanted to hear from home just as bad as though there had been five hundred in that very place. And a fellow that had dug in the ground about eleven feet and had found some rock with a little stain on it and had had the stain assayed, wanted to hear from home right off. He stayed there and dreamed about fortune, palaces, pictures, carriages, statues, and the whole future was simply an avenue of joy upon which he and his wife and the children would ride up and down. He wanted to write a letter right off. He wanted to tell the folks how he felt. Do you think that man would not sign a petition for another mail? Do you think that fellow would vote to send a stupid man to Congress who could not get another mail? He felt rich; he was sleeping right over a hole that had millions in it, and he had not much respect for a Government that could not afford to send a millionaire a letter.
Now, Mr. Bliss tells you that we forged petitions, and in only a few moments, as the Court will remember, he had the kindness to say that anybody in the world would sign a petition for anything, and the question arises if people are so glad to sign petitions why should we forge their names. Do you not see that doctrine kind of swallows itself. You certainly would not forge the name of a man to a note who was hunting you up to sign it. And yet the doctrine of the Government is that while the whole West rose en masse, each man with a pen in his hand and inquiring for a petition, these defendants deliberately went to work and forged it. It won't do, gentlemen. Oh, my Lord, what a thing a little common sense is when you come to think about it, when you come to place it before your mind.
Now, the next great trouble in this case, gentlemen, is that we bid on routes that were not productive. When you remember that Congress made all these routes—now Congress did it; we did not do it—you will protect us. We did not make a solitary route upon which we bid, strange as it may appear. Congress, with the map of the Territories and the States of the Union before it, marked out all the routes. Congress determined where these routes should run. And yet this case has been tried as though in reality we were the parties who determined it.
Now, let me say something right here. It is for Congress to determine first of all on what routes the mail shall be carried. I want you to understand that, to get it into your heads, way in, that Congress determined that question, and that there has to be a law passed that the mail shall be carried from Toquerville to Adairville, from Rawlins to White River. That law has to be passed first, and Congress has to say that that route shall be established. Now, get that in your minds. I give you my word we never established a mail on the earth. That was done by Congress, and the moment Congress establishes a route it becomes the duty of the Second Assistant Postmaster-General to put the service upon that route, and the duty of the First Assistant Postmaster-General to name the offices on that route. Is not that true? That is the doctrine. Now, that had all been done before we entered into a conspiracy. These routes had not only been established, but the Government had advertised for service on these routes, and we bid. That was our crime.
These gentlemen said, I believe, at one time, that they were about to lift a little of the curtain, to expose the action of Congress. You see this suit has threatened the whole Government. If the Constitution weathers this storm it will be in luck. They were going to raise the curtain. They were going to be like children hanging around a circus tent. One lifts it up and hallooes to another, "Come quick, I see a horse's foot." They said that they were going to show the rascality of Congress. They have never done it. I suppose the reason may be that their pay depends upon an act of Congress, but they let that alone. Now, they say that Congress committed a great mistake. Why, they say they were routes that were not productive, and we knew it, and that when the people asked for expedition and increase on a route that was not productive we were guilty of fraud.
Now, gentlemen, let us see: There are not a great many productive post-offices in the United States. They say that a post-office that is not productive should be wiped out. Let me say to you, you cut off the post-offices that are not productive and you will have thousands the next day that are not productive. It is the unproductive offices that make others productive. You cut off those that are not productive and you will have double the number that are not productive. You cut off all those that are unproductive and you will have nothing left but the mail line. You might say that there is not a spring that flows into the Mississippi that is navigable. Let us cut off the springs. Then what becomes of the Mississippi? That is not navigable either. It is on account of the streams not navigable, emptying into one, that the one into which they empty, becomes navigable. And yet, these gentlemen say in the interest of navigation, "Let us stop the springs because you cannot run a boat up them." That is their doctrine. There is no sense in that. You have got to treat this country as one country. You have got to treat the post-offices business as a unit for an entire country. You have got to say that wherever the flag floats the mail shall be carried, wherever American citizens live they shall be visited with the intelligence of the nineteenth century. That is what you have got to say. You have got to get up on a good high plane, and you have got to run a great Government like this that dominates the fortune of a continent, and you have got to run it like great men. There has got to be some genius in this thing and not little bits of suspicion.
Productiveness! Let us see. We are informed by Mr. Bliss, who is paid for saying it, otherwise he would not, that the West is perfectly willing to have mail facilities at the expense of the East. I do not think the gentleman comprehends the West. There is nothing so laughable, and sometimes there is nothing so contemptible, as the egotism of a little fellow who lives in a big town. Some people really think that New York supports this country, and probably it never entered the mind of Mr. Bliss that this country supported New York. But it does. All the clerks in that city do not make anything, they do not manufacture anything, they do not add to the wealth of this world. I tell you, the men who add to the wealth of this world are the men who dig in the ground. The men who walk between the rows of corn, the men who delve in the mines, the men who wrestle with the winds and waves of the wide sea, the men on whose faces you find the glare of forges and furnaces, the men who get something out of the ground, and the men who take something rude and raw in nature and fashion it into form for the use and convenience of men, are the men who add to the wealth of this world. All the merchants in this world would not support this country. My Lord! you could not get lawyers enough on a continent to run one town. And yet, Mr. Bliss talks as though he thought that all the mutton and beef of the United States were raised in Central Park, as though we got all our wool from shearing lambs in Wall Street. It won't do, gentlemen. There is a great deal produced in the Western country. I was out there a few years ago, and found a little town like Minneapolis with fifteen thousand people, and everybody dead-broke. I went there the other day and found eighty thousand people, and visited one man who grinds five thousand bushels of flour each day. I found there the Falls of Saint Anthony doing work for a continent without having any back to ache, grinding thirty thousand bushels of flour daily. Just think of the immense power it is. Millions of feet of lumber in this very country, and Dakota, over which some of these routes run, yielding a hundred million bushels of wheat. Only a few years ago I was there and passed over an absolute desert, a wilderness, and on this second visit found towns of five and six and seven thousand inhabitants. There is not a man on this jury, there is not a man in this house with imagination enough to prophesy the growth of the great West, and before I get through I will show you that we have helped to do something for that great country.
Productiveness! Let me tell you where that idea of productiveness was hatched, where it was born, the egg out of which it came. It was by the act of March 2, 1799, just after the Revolution, and just after our forefathers had refused to pay their debts, just after they had repudiated the debt of the Confederation, just after they had allowed money to turn to ashes in the pockets of the hero of Yorktown, or had allowed it to become worthless in the hand of the widow and the orphan. In 1799, the time when economy trod upon the heels almost of larceny, our Congress provided that the Postmaster-General should report to Congress after the second year of its establishment every post-road which should not have produced one-third the expense of carrying the mail. Recollect it, and I want you to recollect in this connection that we never established a post-route in the world. We will show that, anyway, if we show nothing else. By the act of 1825 a route was discontinued within three years that did not produce a fourth of the expenses. Now, when those laws were in force the postage was collected at the place of delivery.
But in old times, gentlemen, in Illinois, in 1843, it was considered a misfortune to receive a letter. The neighbors sympathized with a man who got a letter. He had to pay twenty-five cents for it. It took five bushels of corn at that time, five bushels of oats, four bushels of potatoes, ten dozen eggs to get one letter. I have myself seen a farmer in a perturbed state of mind, going from neighbor to neighbor telling of his distress because there was a letter in the post-office for him. In 1851 the postage was reduced to three cents when it was prepaid, and the law provided that the diminution of income should not discontinue any route, neither should it affect the establishment of new routes, and for the first time in the history of our Government the idea of productiveness was abandoned. It was not a question of whether we would make money by it or not; the question was, did the people deserve a mail and was it to the interest of the Government to carry that mail? I am a believer in the diffusion of intelligence. I believe in frequent mails. I believe in keeping every part of this vast Republic together by a knowledge of the same ideas, by a knowledge of the same facts, by becoming acquainted with the same thoughts. If there is anything that is to perpetuate this Republic it is the distribution of intelligence from one end to the other. Just as soon as you stop that we grow provincial; we get little, mean, narrow prejudices; we begin to hate people because we do not know them; we begin to ascribe all our faults to other folks. I believe in the diffusion of intelligence everywhere. I want to give to every man and to every woman the opportunity to know what is happening in the world of thought.
I want to carry the mail to the hut as well as to the palace. I want to carry the mail to the cabin of the white man or the colored man, no matter whether in Georgia, Alabama, or in the Territories. I want to carry him the mail and hand it to him as I hand it to a Vanderbilt or to a Jay Gould. That is my doctrine. The law of 1851 did away with your productiveness nonsense, and when the mails were first put upon railways in the year 1838, the law made a limit, not on account of productiveness, but a limit of cost, and said the mail should not cost to exceed three hundred dollars a mile. Let me correct myself. In 1838 a law was passed that the mails might be carried by railroad provided they did not cost in excess of twenty-five per cent, over the cost of mail coaches. In 1839 that law was repealed, and the law then provided that the pay on railways should be limited to three hundred dollars a mile. So you see how much productiveness has to do with this business. In 1861 Congress provided for an overland mail. Did they look out for productiveness? The overland mail in 1861 was a little golden thread by which the Pacific and the Atlantic could be united through the great war. Just a mail, carrying now and then a letter in 1861, and they were allowed, I think, twenty or thirty days to cross. Was productiveness thought of? Congress provided that they might pay for that service eight hundred thousand dollars a year. The mail did not exceed a thousand pounds. Including everything. Some letters that were carried from this side to the other cost the Government three hundred dollars apiece. What was the object? It was simply that the hearts of the Atlantic and the Pacific might feel each other's throb through the great war. That is all. Suppose some poor misguided attorney had stood up at that time and commenced talking about productiveness. In the presence of these great national objects the cost fades, sinks. It is absolutely lost. Wherever our flag flies I want to see the mail under it. After awhile we established what is known as the free-delivery system. That was first established on the idea of productiveness. Whenever you start a new idea, as a rule, you have to appeal to all the meanness that is in conservatism. Before you can induce conservatives to do a decent action you have to prove to them that it will pay at least ten per cent. So they started that way. They said, "We will only have this free delivery system where it pays." We went on and found the system desirable, and that many people wanted it, and that the revenues of the Post-Office Department were so great that we could afford it, and we commenced having it where it did not pay. Right here in the city of Washington, right here in the capital of the great Republic, we have the free delivery system. Is it productive? Last year we lost twenty-one thousand dollars distributing letters to the attorneys for the prosecution and others. And yet now this District has the impudence to talk about productiveness. If anybody wants to find that fact it can be found on pages 42 and 45 of the Postmaster-General's report. Productiveness! We have now a railway service in the United States. I want to know if that is calculated upon the basis of productiveness. A car starts from the city of New York, and runs twelve hours ahead of the ordinary time to the city of Chicago for the simple purpose of carrying the mail, stopping only where the engine needs water, only when the monster whose bones are steel and whose breath is flame, is tired. Do you suppose that pays? You could scarcely put letters enough into the cars at three cents apiece to pay for the trip. At last we regard this whole country as a unit for this business. We say the American people are to be supplied. We do not care whether they live in New York or in Durango; we do not care whether they are among the steeples of the East or the crags of the West; we do not care whether they live in the villages of New England or whether they are staked out on the plains of New Mexico. For the purpose of the distribution of intelligence this great country is one. Do you see what a big idea that is? When it gets into the heads of some people you have no idea how uncomfortable they feel. I have as much interest in this country as anybody, just exactly, and I am willing to subscribe my share to have this mail carried so that the man on the very western extreme, on the hem of the national garment, may have just as much as the man who lives here in the shadow of the Capitol. You see whenever a man gets to the height where he does not want anything that he is not willing to give somebody else, then he first begins to appreciate what a gentleman is and what an American should be. Productiveness! I say that all the State and Territorial lines have been brushed aside. We do not carry the mail in a State because it pays. We carry it because there are people there; because there are American citizens there; not because it pays. The post-office is not a miser; it is a national benefactor. There are only seventeen States in this Union where the income of the Post-Office Department is equal to the outlay; only seventeen States in this Union. There are twenty-one States in which the mail is carried at a loss. There are ten Territories in which we receive substantially nothing in return for carrying the mail, and there is one District, the District of Columbia. I do not know how many miles square this magnificent territory is; I guess about six. Thirty-six square miles. How much is the loss in this District per annum? About one thousand five hundred dollars a square mile. The annual loss right here in this District is fifty-eight thousand dollars, and yet the citizens of this town are rascally enough to receive the mail, according to the prosecution. Why is it not stopped? Why is not the Postmaster-General indicted for a conspiracy with some one? This little territory, six miles square has a loss of fifty-eight thousand dollars.