The same might be said of the four carloads of Senatorial eloquence referred to on a previous page. Those cars were franked through during the weighing period in the postal service. There is this difference, however, between those four cars of franked eloquence and the drum of coffee and sack of sawdust. The former was an abuse of the postal service and a raid upon its revenues by permission, if not by authority, of the postal statutes. The latter was an abuse of the postal service and raid upon its revenues by employes of the Postoffice Department itself.
But the point we are after is the extent of federal departmental raid upon the postal revenues. How much is it? I have confessed my ignorance of the sum such raid will total. Our Postmaster General has (see last preceding quotation), confessed his ignorance of the total. He says there can be “no doubt that it annually reaches into many millions.”
I have no other evidence or authority at hand save the testimony of William A. Glasgow, Jr., before the Penrose-Overstreet Commission in 1906. Mr. Glasgow represented the Periodical Publishers’ Association. In presenting the case for that association—strong, reputable body, representing vast business and public service (educational, social, fraternal and trade interests)—Mr. Glasgow used the following language:
You may take the revenues of the Postoffice Department and give away $19,000,000 per annum in the franking privilege to other departments of government and then give away $28,000,000 per annum in the beneficent advantages of rural free delivery, and then lose millions in unequal and exorbitant transportation charges, certainly $5,000,000, and thus create an apparent and artificial deficit and use that as a basis for further taxation upon those who read magazines, but no one will be deceived by such an excuse and no wise Congress will be moved by considerations so transparent or necessities so unreal.—Page 544 Penrose-Overstreet Report (Hearings), 1906-7.
If Mr. Glasgow were speaking in 1911, I have no doubt he would have raised his figure of $19,000,000 to twenty or more millions as a nearer approximate of the total of federal departmental raids upon the earnings or revenues of the Postoffice Department.
Do not misunderstand me.
All legitimate departmental service should be rendered by the Postoffice Department, but that department should receive credit for such service rendered.
The departmental “abuses” of the postal service are steals. They should not be tolerated. If extra-departmental service is rendered (as is well known it is), it should be paid for just the same—and at the same service rates—that Jim Jones, Susie Bowers and Widow Finerty are compelled to pay for similar service.
Now, we have raidings on the postoffice revenues by the government departments themselves, including free in county, and by the Postoffice Department’s looseness of methods in handling its own business, of somewheres around $22,000,000 a year, not counting the stuffing of weights during the “weighing period”, which goes to swell the railway mail pay rates for mail carrying railroads for a period of four years.
As to the last, I wish to say that Mr. Hitchcock, the present Postmaster General, has done more to correct such weighing frauds than has any of his predecessors within the range of my study of the question. Yet it lingers—hangs on to an extent which should put some subordinate postoffice officials and railway officials in restraint—put them out of range of opportunity for such looting.