Such were the accumulations of this company whose own statement admitted that the equipment actually used in its transportation business represented only $2,044,000. The company has always paid large dividends. Its star performance in this line was the payment, early in 1910, of a cash dividend of 300 per cent. Every holder of a one-hundred-dollar share of stock was given three hundred dollars cash!
This was not all. The stock of the company was worth in the market exceedingly high prices. In addition to giving this 300-per-cent cash dividend, the company increased its stock from $8,000,000 to $24,000,000, and gave the holders of the original $8,000,000 the right to subscribe at par for two shares of the new issue for each share of their previous holding.
Enormous Profits of the Express Companies
These figures suggest the profits express companies have been making. They have been making them because our government is the only government which permits such a monopoly. It is a monopoly which not only extorts millions upon millions every year from the people, but which enables railroad companies, through their intimate business and financial relations with the express companies, to conceal a very considerable part of their earnings. The express companies are large holders of one another’s stock, and also of railway stock; in turn, the men who control the great railway combinations are themselves big owners of express-company stocks and bonds. The express companies lease from the railroads the right to transport freight over the railroad lines. The terms of these leases represent, not a reasonable and fair charge for the service, but an elaborate project of covering up excessive earnings and extortionate charges in a maze of complicated intercorporation transactions.
The worst penalty that the American public pays in order that the express grafters may make these huge profits and conduct these manipulations, does not lie in the excessive charges. It lies rather in the stunting and depressing effect upon general business, which is a necessary and manifest result of a policy that denies the freest and cheapest transportation facilities to the entire community.
Good Housekeeping. 53: 2-10. July, 1911.
Housekeeping by Parcels Post.
Isabel G. Curtis.
What would a parcels post mean to the American housekeeper? The suburban or rural family could receive the bulk of its supplies by mail—clothing, food, even eggs and butter and fresh meat. And the country household that had something to sell could, by availing itself of the parcels post, eliminate the expensive middleman and ship direct to the consumer. Thus the city housekeeper could receive eggs, butter and other things by mail at much less than she pays now. In scores of ways the parcels post would tend greatly to decrease the cost of living, for it would revolutionize the present cumbrous and expensive methods of retail business.