Turn back and look at the table of railway mail-pay (weight). Look at the rate per 100 pound per mile haul—5.85 cents, or eleven and seven-tenths cents for carrying 200 pounds one mile.
Do you weigh 200 pounds? If not, our President and several other gentlemen in this country do, and you, the President, or the other gentlemen, will be carried—and for thirty or more years have been carried on any railroad east of the “Rockies”—for three cents a mile.
Now, you, the President, or other gentlemen, pay only two cents a mile for rail haulage on most all of the cornfield or “feeder” lines (and on “trunk” lines as well), east of the Rocky Mountains.
You see the joke of it? The postal revenue raid in it?
Two hundred pounds of United States mail is railroaded in a general—a catch-all or pick-up—car at a government charge of 11.7 cents per mile, while you, the President, or other gentlemen, pay but 3 cents! You, and the other fellows as well, have an upholstered seat, have watering and toilet facilities and accommodations, have smoking, “pitch,” “high-five,” “cinch,” “euchre” and, maybe, even “poker” as divertisements—with palatable “wets” on the side!
You, the President, and the other gentlemen, have all this sumptuous haulage for three (or two) cents a mile, while the 200 pounds (averaged every four years) of United States mail, handled as junk or dunnage, pays 11.7 cents a mile.
Does it not look—look to you—somewhat off at the corners somewhere? Does it not look as if that railway “system” feeder line was getting robustly large pay for the service rendered?
Well, if it does not so appear to you, it appears to me that you should, at your earliest convenience, consult some qualified and competent alienist, or drop into a “rest resort” for six months or more.
As to the other weights given in that tabulation—500, 1,000 and up to 5,000—nothing here needs be said. They are all below the “postoffice car” weights. At the weights, 5,000 pounds per day of mail-haul, the student of this rail-mail pay raid should sit up and begin to observe his nurse and the attending physician.
Before I further inflict the reader with personal comments, it might be of mutual advantage to quote a recognized authority on the weights actually carried in postal mail cars—weights of actual mail.