But why, in the name of George Washington, should all these hospital cars be charged up to the Postoffice Department? Yes, why?
Oh, yes, I know that they are all in “service” or “reserve”—all subject to department orders. But when one looks down from the ladder top into these shop-hospital yards for car patients, he not unfrequently sees, unless he is freakishly nearsighted or a victim of a new brand of strabismus, an old “flat-wheeler” which bears a marked resemblance to one that he used to, in days agone (long agone), pause, while husking the “down-row,” and gaze at in admiration as well as wonderment. Of course, it did not wear “flat wheels” then. It also carries some mars and scars of time, just as The Man on the Ladder carries marks which did not stand out so conspicuously then as now. But there, on its sides, appears, somewhat dimmed by age, that patriotic, stirring designation: U. S. Mail Car.
This is not intended as a criticism. It is merely a suggestion as to where the present or some future Second Assistant Postmaster General may find additional raiding into the postal revenues.
A few years since, Professor Parsons asserted, (so the public press declared—I have not the document by me and am writing hurriedly—the Professor will, therefore, excuse me if I mis-spell or misquote. Corrections will be made in later editions) that the railway mail pay and car rental raid amounted to something like $24,000,000 a year.
Speaking again from press reports, Mr. Hitchcock seems to have been going after those raiders. At any rate he appears to have stopped that graft sluiceway to the extent—reports vary—of from nine to fourteen millions of dollars a year.
Again, Mr. Hitchcock, we say, may your tribe increase—on this line of action.
Now let us return and do a little “red-school-house” figuring on this railroad pay raid. Some pages back, we reprinted Mr. Kirkman’s tables of weight and car rental pay to the railways. You can glance back and verify the figures when you deem necessary. Here “orders” force me to hurry. But in spite of orders a few generalizations in “cipherin,” have to be made.
Many pages back, the Postoffice Department’s own distribution of mail weights for 1907 (the last preceding “weighing period”), was printed. For ready reference, we will here reprint it.