| Per Cent. | |
| First-class matter | 7.29 |
| Second-class matter | 36.38 |
| Third-class matter | 8.32 |
| Fourth-class matter | 2.73 |
| Franked matter | .21 |
| Penalty matter | 1.99 |
| Equipment carried in connection therewith | 38.12 |
| Empty equipment dispatched | 4.96 |
| Total | 100.00 |
A few pages back we figured out how a 200-pound mail weight haul stacks against, around and up-to a 200-pound human avoirdupois haul, assuming, of course, that the aforesaid avoirdupois is not casketed with the mail, express or baggage in front. Well, with that understanding, the reader may take my previous statements anent those 200 pounds of U. S. mail matter and human avoirdupois—whether citizen or imported—as made. He should also understand that what was then said fits, of course with a varying application, to the wheatfield, cornfield, oilfield, cottonfield, timber, tobacco and other “feeder” fields, which carry our mails at varying rates of pay for varying weights up to 5,000 pounds.
Now, at the weight of 5,000 pounds (2½ tons), is about where the “postoffice car” enters, and it is to the mail-carriage-pay the railways get for this postoffice car service we wish here to “cipher” on a little. As a start, however, the “example” must be “set.” To do that a little preliminary figuring must be done.
The quadrennial weighing of the mails is now in progress. The last preceding weighing was in 1907. In the interim, however, Mr. Hitchcock, has made some special or test weighing—a good and commendable business movement—of second-class mail.
From these weighings the department, I take it, has arrived at estimated results more or less satisfactory—to itself at least. The 1910 report presents a tabulated tonnage of second-class matter on page 329. A prolix discussion of the cost of handling second-class mail appears on immediately associated pages. The discussion is a masterly, a forensic, production, and, outside of Indiana, the habitat of experts, it may stand out in fair form as a literary production. Our Third Assistant Postmaster General must, though, have got the wires crossed or the gear jammed on his comptometer to have reached those two “answers.”
Sixty-two and a fraction per cent of the total mail is second class.
To haul and handle a pound of second-class mail costs the government nine and a fraction cents.
SOME LITTLE RED SCHOOL HOUSE FIGURING.
Now, let us sit down on the veranda, bring out the little red school house slates and do some figuring on this railway pay problem, question, proposition, or whatever the “experts” may choose to call it.