Yes, why not?
Skilled lawyers, reputed “experts,” men of “experience” and “students,” it would seem, have told all they know about this railway mail cost problem—told the truth or equivocated or lied about it, to the best of their ability and in full accord and harmony with their several “standards” of veracity. Still they have failed to uncover or to divulge the essential and governing factors in the problem—failed for thirty or forty years. Is it not about time, then, for sensible people, I would ask, to enter the plea of the Master and say, “Suffer little children to come unto me?”
Any average “shock” of eighth-grade nubbins from Cornville, or from other hamlets where the “little red school house” has been in fairly active operation, will “figger” the cost—the cost to the railroads—of mail haulage and handling, in not to exceed four weeks.
That is, such a bunch of eighth graders will arrive at a dependable solution of this forty-year-old problem in four weeks, if they are given the plain, bald facts upon which a correct solution depends, and not turned loose on a lot of befuddling, alleged data and accepted “testimony.”
As I must necessarily touch upon the raid of the railroads into postal revenues when I reach the closing division of this volume, I shall not comment further here on the testimony and special pleadings presented by railroad representatives to the several postal commissions that have sat and sat and then “reported.” The commissions probably—possibly, if not probably—reported the best they could on the evidence presented to them. Certain it is, their reports present much valuable—much informative—data of which neither Congress nor the Postoffice Department appears to have made any constructive or corrective use.
Before quitting this railway pay raid, however, it may be well to do a little figuring—basing our figures on Mr. Kirkman’s tabulations of rates, printed some pages back. The tables of rates are correct. They ought to be. If rate-tables could vote the youngest of the two was entitled to the suffrage many years since.[15] But let us look into and over them in a little-red-school-house way.
The first mail rail-haul weight is 200 pounds. That weight of mail is carried on some cornfield railroad—“a feeder.” It is all bundled or sacked, if “free in country” or other second-class matter, sacked or pouched if first or third-class, and, also, if valuable fourth-class. Some of the fourth-class, if large in dimension of package, may, of course, be loose. But whatever their class, character, pouching, sacking, casing, or jacketing, that estimated weight (estimated once every four years), is received by the railroad and dumped into a corner of a “general utility” car. By that I mean a car used for carrying baggage and express matter, between stations—jars, buckets, boxes, bags, etc., of local “favors” or shipments; such as jam, fruits, eggs, butter, and even “line loafers” who are going to mother, uncle, or friend for a few days feed, or—sometimes—going to the local metropolis for a “good time.”
But let us, for the moment, stick to that quadrenially estimated 200 pounds of mail. At the several stations along the cornfield or “feeder” railroad the packages, sacks and pouches of mail are tossed off to the station agent. Coops of chickens, cases of eggs, tubs or jars of butter and crates of fruit or vegetables are taken on.
Have you, the reader, ever traveled on a “cornfield line?” Have you ever “got off to stretch your limbs” at some station between start or “change” to destination? Have you, while stretching those limbs of yours, ever noticed or taken note of the miscellaneous and promiscuous sort of goods—merchandise and human adipose tissue—that get into companionship, into carriage or housed connection, with that “estimated” 200 pounds of United States mail?
Well, if you have, no argument is necessary to convince you that the “railway mail pay” rate on that cornfield line is from two to five times the rate paid for any other weight (tonnage) carried.