Q. Can you say, approximately, how much?—A. No, sir. It will afford me great pleasure to give you all this information that can be determined if you desire, but it is valueless in itself.
Q. Can you say approximately?—A. I can not. I would be very glad to furnish you all the figures, but such questions, like the cost of the velocity with which we send trains across the country, are unknown.
Q. Does it cost a dollar a mile as the outside?—A. I could not——
Q. Would it not?—A. I would not want to pay you the disrespect of saying a thing that I know nothing about.
The foregoing testimony appears on pages 213-216 of the Wolcott report. The italics are mine. When so well informed a railroad man as Mr. Kirkman answers questions—questions covering that which appears, to a layman at least, to be essential in successful railway management—as he is reported in the foregoing, what is to be thought of such testimony? With all due respect to Mr. Kirkman, it may be said that his apparently frank confession of ignorance as to several points made subject of inquiry by the commissioners in the part of his testimony quoted, many readers of it are left with more or less valid grounds for doubt—grounds for asking more or less offensive questions: “Was the witness telling the truth or equivocating—stalling for time?” If he told the truth—if his acknowledged ignorance was genuine—as to several essential factors in the successful management and financing of a railroad—then of what value are his—or any other railroad man’s—statistics and tabulations of cost, profits, losses, rates, tariffs, “cost of velocity,” etc., etc.?
Mr. Kirkman’s reputation for truth and veracity, I believe, is as high as that of any other railroad man’s in the country, yet on several basic factors in the problem which the Wolcott Commission was, presumably at least, trying to solve, he confessed an ignorance as profound as its members and the officials of the Postoffice Department acknowledge. If, as Mr. Kirkman virtually testifies, the information sought is beyond the ken of man, then why persist in spending thousands—yes millions—of money trying to run it down?
If these railroad men do not know the things which it is necessary to know to arrive at a solution of this railway mail carrying problem—to arrive at a just, equitable rate of pay for the service rendered—why waste more time on them?
That question brings us back to the rails again.
Why do not our postal officials and commissions reach out to Cornville and summon a few eighth-grade nubbins? Then turn over to them the wastefully collected and collated statistics, data and talk which the Postoffice Department has in cold storage and tell them to “go to it” at, say, $25 per week?