Postal officials have exhausted conjecture as a basis for a correct solution of this problem. Nearly every year there has been a new guess. Mr. Madden, Third Assistant Postmaster-General for seven years up to 1907, guessed that it cost 4 cents a pound. His successor, Mr. Lawshe, guessed 2½ cents and then the next year 4 cents. For the last two years the Department’s guess has been 9 cents.
The Penrose-Overstreet Commission declared, while it is impossible to ascertain with certainty what the cost is, the members of the Commission gave it as their opinion that “One cent a pound is approximately adequate compensation for handling and transporting second-class matter.”
I am confident that there is a better way of solving the problem than has heretofore been tried. This consists in the direct application of plain, old-fashioned common sense to it. A little gumption in such a matter as this is far better than fanciful guessing or astute figuring by experts, who are bent on finding something that is not there.
In working out this problem I have adopted a method quite different and have obtained results quite unlike the foregoing. I show the relation of second-class mail to stamp mail extending over a period of 25 years, from 1885 to 1910. This covers the entire period since the institution of the cent a pound rate.
I go back still further to 1876 when the postage rate on newspapers was 4 times greater than now, when the sale of stamps was less than one-eleventh what it is now, and while deficits were larger.
The highest point reached in the weight of second-class matter previous to the institution of the present rate, was 101,057,963 pounds.
It has been repeatedly declared officially that second-class matter originates large quantities of other classes of mail, and in the official figures we have the proof.
While population increased from 1885 to 1910 only a little more than double, the revenue from the sale of stamps, etc., and the weight of second-class matter, each increased over 5 times. No other possible reason can be assigned for the increase in stamp mail, and the tremendous development of every branch of the postal business 5 times faster than the growth of population, than the increased circulation and influence of the newspaper and periodical press, brought about by the reduced postage rate.
Second-Class matter would have long ago wiped out all deficits and created an enormous annual surplus had it not been for the great burdens which weighed the service down.
There would have been a surplus, instead of a deficit, every year since 1901, had allowance been made for the extraordinary cost of free rural delivery, and in 1910, the surplus would have been $31,075,170.12.