Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

Sufficient has here been said, however, to show any fair-minded reader that our express companies, or the railways which use the express companies merely as pinch-bars to pry into our postal revenues on the one hand and as cloaks for excessive rates to the general public for handling light or parcels freight on the other, are illegally taking millions of dollars annually for a service which should be, and which was originally intended to be, rendered by the Postoffice Department.

I say that the express companies, or the railroads over which they operate and which, today, virtually own and control them, are doing an illegal business—a business carried on in flat contravention and defiance of the plain letter of the federal statutes.

I say further: The contravention of law which makes this vast lootage—steal—possible has no other basis for its past and present raiding of the field of postal revenues than corrupted federal legislators and, either corrupted or loose screwed, juridic opinions which are permitted to stand in place of the plainly worded statute of 1845.

And there is a colossal irony in the brazen effrontery with which this raiding of the postal revenues by the express companies has been, and is, carried on.

On the one hand, we have public officials cackling about its costing the government 4 to 9 cents a pound to transport and handle second-class mail matter—rather, making voluble and voluminous guesses that it costs from 4 to 9 cents a pound—while on the other hand, the express companies enter into contracts with publishers to carry and deliver at line stations that same second-class matter at one-half cent a pound.

When it is remembered that the express companies must “split” with the transporting railroad to the extent of 40 to 63 per cent of their gross haulage and delivery charge, the talk of its costing the government 4 to 9 cents to do what the express companies do for a half-cent—in some cases possibly, for less even than that—passes, from the domain of irony and becomes disgusting twaddle.

The postal rate for carrying merchandise parcels not exceeding four pounds is 16 cents a pound. That rate is, as previously stated, outrageously high and the maximum weight of four pounds is almost as outrageously low. Both the postal weight and rate have been held for years at the figures named, it has been numerously asserted and is generally believed, by the “influence” of express company and railroad lobbying in Congress. The result is that by far the larger portion of light or parcels shipments go by express instead of by mail, as it was clearly intended in the law of 1845 they should go.

To get this business, the express companies cut under the government charge of 16 cents a pound, as they can both easily and profitably do.

Nor do they hold the shipper to a maximum of four pounds for any single package or parcel. In fact, they set up practically no maximum parcels weight, and they deliver at any postoffice or station along their lines of service. In fact, again, the express companies now have, it is asserted, a sort of compensating agreement by which the company collecting the business can have another company make deliveries, each company taking its prorated share of the profit on the carriage and handling of the parcel or consignment.