“That … pay may be allowed for every line comprising a daily trip each way of railway postoffice cars, at a rate not exceeding twenty-five dollars per mile per annum for cars forty feet in length.…”
Let us here take note what the foregoing tabulated figures mean—figures which Mr. Kirkman argued, if I read his testimony correctly, are too low[14]. I have read the testimony of numerous other railroad representatives, testimony before the Loud Commission, 1898, the Wolcott Commission, 1901, the Penrose-Overstreet Commission, 1907, and before the Hughes Commission, whose report is not yet compiled for publication. Each and all of them, so far as I have read their testimony, argue eloquently that the present rates of railway mail-pay and car rentals are, if unfair at all, unfair to the railroads—that the rates of pay are too low.
In this connection a most peculiar, if not indeed a peculiarly suggestive, harmony of opinion appears to have existed between the special pleaders for the railroads in this matter of railway mail-pay and government officials—both executive and legislative—who have had most to do with fixing railway pay rates. The government has spent millions of dollars for investigations by commissions, by Senate and House committees, by inspectors, special agents, etc. Each commission has heard numerously from the railways. Twenty-seven of them were in hearing before the Wolcott Commission. The testimony of Mr. Kirkman, from whom I quote the preceding tabulations, while varying in phase, phrase and verbiage from the other railroad representatives, has two essential features common to them all, or, I should say, three features common to them all.
1. The railroad representatives unanimously oppose any reduction in the rates for railway mail pay (weights pay), and mail car rentals—“space charge,” they call it.
2. They are a unit in declaring that the present rates are too low, but they as unitedly express a willingness to continue business at the old rates rather than to contemplate the possibility of a reduction in them, or even squarely to argue the justice and fairness of such a reduction.
3. When forced down to “tacks”—down to specific facts—by some interrogating member of the commission before which they are testifying, these railroad representatives again have a marked similarity as to “form.” Each comes eloquently forward with his own set or sets of figures and proceeds to make his own application of them. But when some commissioner asks for information and enlightenment as to “net cost,” “relative cost,” etc., of mail carriage as compared with the cost of express, freight or passenger handling, the railroad representatives, almost to a man, at once begin to display a dense denseness that is marvelously wondrous or wonderously marvelous, as the reader may choose to word it.
The peculiar or suggestive harmony between the opinions of these railway representatives and the controlling executive and legislative officials of the Federal Government, is especially conspicuous under point 2 as numbered above. The railway people plead that the ruling rates are too low, but are willing to stand for them. However, they do not want the rates lowered.
The peculiar harmony of opinions just adverted to is ample evidence, or so it appears to The Man on the Ladder, of this one fact:
The present rates of pay for railway mail weight carriage are the rates fixed by the act of 1879. Freight, express and passenger rates or tariffs have been changed—have been lowered. The railways did not want the mail rates lowered and the governmental powers that be, and have been, were apparently at least, quite willing to take their view of the matter, even if they did not concur in the numerous half-baked, threadbare arguments advanced by the railroad people in support.
The rates of railway mail pay have remained the same for thirty-three years—until 1908.