“Anyone who has stood in a German post-office, and has seen the constant stream of men, women and children, pouring in through the doors with packages of all descriptions and sizes, and lining up in never-ending rows before half a dozen and more receiving officials; who has watched heavy wagons driving up to the doors and depositing hundreds of packages, and who has noticed the mountains of parcels heaped up in rear rooms of the post-office, cannot but have been forcibly struck with the magnitude of the parcels post system of transportation in Germany.”
Does it not occur to the most casual thinker that if a comparable service were enacted in this country the postal facilities of every city would be inadequate to the work? Why, you would have to have in New York city one hundred times as great an amount of space at your disposal as the Post Office Department has or can readily get at present. It would involve a thorough readjustment and enormous expansion of the post office facilities in every large and small city of the United States, involving an equipment expenditure which would run to hundreds of millions of dollars—this irrespective of the question whether it would produce a profit or a loss in operating expenses.
There are in the United States more than 50,000 fourth-class postmasters of these 50 per cent get $100 per annum or less, and 25 per cent of them get less than $50.00 per annum. How long would it be before they would demand an increase of salary to something like $75.00 per month or more?
The Vice-President of the J. F. Stevens Arms and Tool Co., told me that if such a service were inaugurated as that of Great Britain, it would change entirely the methods of distribution of his own house. They would be obliged to discontinue their present freight shipments of arms in carload lots to the Pacific Coast at a rate of $3.00 per hundred pounds upon a twenty-day time schedule for transportation, and take advantage of the pound rate that the government would give to them upon a six-day time schedule; that while it would involve increasing their office force from less than 50 to more than 500 to handle the work, the savings would be so large that they would have to do this and to inaugurate many other most radical and far-reaching changes in organization.
If this meant that the service was going to be reduced in cost, while at the same time shortening the time schedule by more than two-thirds, always an important factor in increasing rather than in diminishing expense account, we should all of us find it our duty to welcome the innovation, great a wrench as it might give to our business connections. But the costs of the service will not be changed, simply it will be a different set of people who pay them and no longer would all the costs be paid by the proper parties—the manufacturer and his customer, the consumer—but a large proportion by the public at large in some way or other.
Parcels Post. pp. 6-15.
John A. Ordway.
I question whether there is a man in this hall who actually believes that one cent of benefit will come to the farmer through reduction in his cost price of anything he buys because of postal delivery. Each one of us knows from practical experience that even should the method of distribution be shifted, still the expense of reaching the consumer would increase by the methods advocated, which combined with the profits of inevitable monopoly would cause the poor farmer to wonder whether this alluring vision of substantial comfort had vanished. Yet this sham shibboleth of benefit to the farmer has other advocates besides this small percentage of theorists. The most persistent, continuous, noisy clamor has proceeded from those whose selfish self-seeking is as plain to the searcher for motives as the printed types upon their pages. The editors of various magazines and newspapers not in touch with the cost and expenses of mercantile life have almost universally used their columns to create a public sentiment to accomplish this commercial revolution. Their solicitude for the farmer, their keen distress at what they term his unfortunate dilemma in being forced to supply his present needs through present channels, would wring the stoutest heart, were it not for the perhaps uncharitable suspicion that their tears were of the crocodile variety, and their anguish a thin disguise for rank cupidity. “The poor farmer,” more advertisements; “the unfortunate farmer,” for more advertisements; “we love and would protect the farmer,” still more advertisements; “we will organize and preach of deliverance,” for more advertisements; and so on and so forth shall be our cry until the jobbers’ percentage and the retailers’ narrow margin shall be diverted into “more advertisements,” has been the wailing but insistent note everywhere. “No matter if the actual cash loss of second class matter in 1909 did show a grand total of $64,128,000, what care we? Still shall our cry be, ‘Help the poor farmer.’” Shame on such transparent hypocrisy from a public press that should lead and inspire by truth untainted by the virus of debased commercialism.