(c) The extension of the service to the out-of-town and agricultural population.
(d) The elevation of the employees to the plane of the postal service.
(e) The coordination of country supply of the vital necessaries with urban demand by a cheap and regular collect and delivery service.
(f) As a result, a greater attractiveness in rural life and improved highways.
(g) In 10 years’ time, with the development of the traffic, a reduction of rates to about one-half of the present rates.
It is as difficult to describe in detail the manifold economic and social results of a great agency like this as to give a bill of particulars of the benefits of the postal system. And in this connection it seems not irrelevant to suggest that a proper coordination of the railway mail with the railway express service may indeed render penny postage feasible. As things are now the rural free-delivery agency does not bring a direct fiscal return to pay for itself. In a few years, as the traffic develops in parcels and agricultural products, the proposed system would enable it to do so. This would assure a considerable financial gift to the account of penny postage.
The Agricultural Post
In the present state of things the truck farmer must devote a large part of his time to marketing; that is, to the transportation of his product, however little it may be, to the place of demand. He must also for this purpose provide himself with transportation facilities, however small his business. These involve a horse, and its maintenance and care, and a barn; and the expense of both during the unproductive seasons. And yet in a socio-economic sense his work and expense of transportation is the smallest element in his service to the public, although it requires the maximum of upkeep work and expense, if not of capital. The proposed postal collect and delivery eliminates all these, and would enable the truck farmer to enter into the business on a minimum of capital, and pursue it on a minimum of labor and expense. The field service of a horse he could hire as occasion might require. Thus the truck-farming industry would receive a necessary impetus and the cost of such foods be greatly reduced to the consumer, saying nothing of the advantage in quality coming from a speedier forwarding to the market by daily allotments instead of the delays now incurred to garner a worth-while load.
This application of postal express, with its thoroughly articulated service and regular schedules, may be taken as illustrative of the close relations which may be established between the rural producer and town consumer, as well as between producers and merchants generally.
It is manifestly unfair to the proposition to judge its social value on a mere computation of the savings in rates which may be made. While this saving would amount to some $35,000,000 a year on the traffic of 1909, and from seventy to a hundred millions a year when the traffic reaches its normal dimensions, yet as large benefits will follow in clearing the prohibitive rate clogs from this necessary conduit of commerce that it may freely discharge its normal output, in placing the 50,000 express employees on a postal basis, in rendering it easier to engage in and market food production, to relieve the towns and cities of high prices for necessaries of life, and relieve them, too, of the overplus of labor, and, perhaps, too, in aiding in reversing that tendency of population movement from the country to urban centers to which is due the most aggravated and most discouraging social problems of our time.