People Demand a General Parcels Post. pp. 7-12.
William Sulzer.
Absence of a parcels-post law enables the railroad companies, through subsidiary companies called express companies, to eliminate all competition and prevent all regulation in one branch of transportation and to escape compliance with the laws that are being enforced against them in other branches of transportation by the several state commerce commissions and the Interstate Commerce Commission.
That the owners of the securities of these express companies have made enormous profits is a recognized fact. One hundred per cent, even 200 per cent, profit when an express company “cuts a melon” no longer excites surprise when found in the news columns of our evening paper.
No one objects to a fair profit for good service, but conditions seem to indicate that the transportation companies are not satisfied with the first and are not giving us the second, while developments before commerce commission hearings indicate that their backwardness in adopting economical and scientific business methods causes a tremendous unnecessary expense. This they are meeting by maintaining and even increasing already exorbitant rates for service that many believe are discriminatory, and that grave injury and injustice to business and to the general public results.
As an example, W. P. Dickinson, of the Burlington Railway, is quoted in the Railway Record as saying at a public hearing that the expenditures of the Burlington traffic department for printing and stationery in the fiscal year 1910 was $222,000. Assuming that they are typical for all the railways in the United States, the cost of printing railroad tariffs alone under present methods, is $6,000,000 to $10,000,000. In modern transportation methods, as, for instance, those in vogue in Germany, this expense is so trifling as to be scarcely worth considering. Freights move in Germany on a uniform tariff, based entirely upon bulk, weight, and distance, discrimination is impossible, and any shipper can learn in a moment, by referring to the table, the exact freight charge to any point, and can ship knowing that his competitors must pay the same price for the same service.
In the United States the shipper can not know all the tariffs that are published or how they affect rates. He is supplied with a few easily understood tables, but it is not within human possibility for him to even read, to say nothing of comprehending, the millions that are filed with the commission every year and how they affect the cost of the transportation he buys.
So it seems this extraordinary printing expense of millions, whatever its purpose may be, operates to keep the average shipper ignorant about rates. Ignorance is always dangerous, and particularly so in transportation matters.
Harrington Emerson, the expert, testified at the hearing before the Interstate Commerce Commission at Washington last November, that $300,000,000 annually in railroad operating expenses in this country would be saved if the railroads adopted better business methods of management.
To save for the consumers that enormous sum, no better beginning can be made than for the government to establish a satisfactory parcels post and adopt scientific business methods in its management.