Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

And the people have put up, ungrumblingly, $100,000,000 to $150,000,000 or more (I forget the figures), for a navy—a navy carrying on its payrolls more “shore leave” men and clerks than it has service men. (At any rate that was the showing in a recent year). For this vast expenditure of their money the people got—got what?

Well, for their hundreds of millions expenditure on that navy of ours, the people, to date, have received in return newspaper reports of numerous magazine and gun explosions with, of course, a list of the killed and wounded, and reports of “blow-hole” or otherwise faulted armor plate, turrets, etc., of raising “The Maine,” of shoaling this, that or the other battleship, or of “sparring” or “lightering” off, to the music that is made by a “blow-in” of fifty thousand to two or three hundred thousand more of their money.

Reader, if you read—if you have read—the “news”—the periodical literature—of those past twenty years, you will know that the people have received little or no returns for the vast expenditure of money—of their money—that their representatives (?) have made for the Navy Department.

Oh, yes, I remember that our army and navy fought to a “victorious” conclusion the “Spanish American” war.

No patriotic American citizen alive at the time that war occurred will ever forget it. He will ever remember Siboney, Camp Thomas, Camp Wycoff, and the cattle-ship transports for diseased and dying soldiers. He will also remember the “embalmed beef” and the “decayed tack” and other contracts and contractors.

If the patriotic citizen has been an “old soldier,” or is familiar with the history of wars, he will also know that, if the whole land fighting of that Spanish American war was corralled into one action that action would be infinitely less sanguine than was the action at a number of “skirmishes” in our civil war—that, if the several naval actions of that war were merged into one, it would not equal, in either gore or naval glory, Farragut’s capture of Mobile, the action in Hampton Roads, nor even Perry’s scrimmage on Lake Erie in 1813.

What has all this to do with the postal department deficit, some one may ask? It has just this to do with it:

If a people stand unmurmuringly for the expenditure of billions for a service that yields them no return, save a protection they have not needed and of doubtful security if needed, that people is not going to raise any noisy hubbub over a dinky deficit of a few millions a year for a service which should serve them every day of every year.

I have expanded a little, not disgressed, in writing to my statement numbered 3. I will now proceed with my premeditated statements. Some of them may be a little frigid, but none of them are cold-storage. Some one may have told it all to you before, but that is his fault, not mine. He merely beat me to the facts.

4. As stated in a forward page of this volume, the people of this nation want and demand service of its Postoffice Department. They care not to the extent of a halloween pea-shooter whether the service is rendered at a deficit of six million or at a surplus of ten million, if service is rendered for the money expended.