Next, let us notice that 1,034,000,000 pounds (tail figures again omitted), was not mail at all—sacks, fixtures, etc., etc.
Now, look at it—the result.
Railroads were paid for carrying 2,400,000,000 pounds of mail.
Of that total weight 1,034,000,000 (nearly half) was “equipment” and “empty” equipment “dispatched.”
Beyond the showing of these figures, comment is scarcely necessary for anyone at all familiar with railway traffic methods and costs—whether the haulage is by slow or fast freight or by express—anyone will see the raid in it.
Look at that haulage of “equipment,” which the postoffice revenues pay for! Pay for as mail. Look it over, and over again and then sit up and do a little hard thinking.
Waters Pearse, of Pearseville, Texas, ships, say ten or twenty coops of chickens to Chicago. He may ship by express or by fast freight—the latter of course, if “Wat” and his friends have been able to make up a carload. “Wat” consigns his chickens to some Commission house in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago or elsewhere. Wherever our friend “Wat” of Pearceville, Texas, ships, or whether he ships by express or by fast freight, his empty coops will be returned to him without charge.
If Steve Gingham, in Southern Illinois—“Egypt”—has a hen range and his hens have been busy, Steve will have several cases of eggs to ship every week or ten days. Well, all Steve has to do is to take his cases of eggs over to the railroad station. Some express company will pick them up and take them to Chicago, to St. Louis, to Cincinnati, or other market. In a few days, about the time Steve gets the check for his eggs, he’ll find the cases on the station platform returned to him, without charge.
What we’ve said about our friends, Wat down in Texas, and Steve in “Egypt,” is equally true of any shipment of any sort of specially crated fruit or vegetables, of boxed, bucketed or canned fish, milk, etc., etc. The shipping cases, buckets, boxes or cans are returned to the shipper without charge. Yet here is this great government of ours paying the railways for nearly one ton of fixtures and equipment for every ton of mail (all classes), carried. Fixtures, equipment, etc., aggregated, in the weighing of 1907 (see tabulation a page or two back), 43.08 per cent of the total weight for which the government has paid mail-weight rates for four years—paid for hauling those racks, frames, sacks, etc., etc., back and forth over the rail-line haul every day of the four years.
Railroad people and their representatives have written voluminously, likewise fetchingly, to prove to an easily “bubbled” public that the government has been paying too little rather than too much for the rail carriage of its mails. I have read numerous such vestibuled productions. They were all good; top-branch verbiage and rhetoric, so smooth, noiseless and jarless in coupling that the uncritical reader’s sympathies are often aroused, and his conviction or belief enlisted by the sheer massive grandeur of the terminology used. Try almost any of these promotion railway mail-pay talkers and throw the belt on your own thought-mill while you read. Four times in five the ulterior-motive writer or speaker will have you rolling into the roundhouse or repair shop before you know you have even been coupled onto the train. When you emerge, if your thinker is still off its belt, you will find yourself about ready to “argue” that the railroads are very much underpaid, if, indeed, not grossly wronged by the government. I would like to quote some of the picture arguments from several of these railway studios but cannot. As illustrative of the general ensemble of these forensic art productions, I will, however, reproduce here a gem from one of them—a bit of verbal canvas so generic and homelike as to class as a bit of real genre.