Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

The reader will find it in Pearson’s Magazine for June, 1911. Who personally perpetrated it, I know not, and the magazine sayeth not. The editor of Pearson’s, however, assures us that the article from which the following excerpt is made, was “prepared” by the authority and under the direction of the Committee on Railway Mail Pay, and as prominent members of said committee the editor gives the names of Julius Kruttschnitt, Director of Maintenance and Operation, Union and Southern Pacific Systems; Ralph Peters, President and General Manager, Long Island Railroad; Charles A. Wickersham, President and General Manager, Western Railway of Alabama; W. W. Baldwin, Vice-President, C. B. & Q. Railroad; Frank Barr, Third Vice-President and General Manager of the Boston and Maine Railroad.

That is certainly a representative quintette of railway artists and generally recognized as qualified to produce—verbally—almost anything in railway art, from a freehand tariff to a “car shortage” done in oil while the crops ought to be moving. Am sorry I cannot quote more extendedly. The following, however, will give the reader a sample of the “style” and also of the “argument” common to most of the protective and promotive railway word pictures:

If, as has been reported, a certain railroad president ever did utter the famous phrase attributed to him, “the public be damned,” the public has more than gotten even. It does the damning itself nowadays instead, and so effective is its verdict that we are even confronted with the spectacle of the government itself bowing to the popular prejudice irrespective of the facts in the case. Undoubtedly we have become a nation of stone-throwers. To a certain extent this has worked for the public benefit. Every deserved stone has worked for the correction of admitted evils. But so rapidly has the public taken to the lately discovered pastime of stone-throwing that it not infrequently uses its strength like a giant, and that, we have been told, is tyrannous. Let a corporation raise its head nowadays and it is greeted by a shower of stones of which perhaps not ten per cent. are intelligently cast. The only thing to do in such a case is to “duck;” argument becomes futile in the heat of battle.…

That is sufficient to show the “style.” The article then proceeds to give some mail-service history and to cite a few points wherein by “arbitrary” rulings the government is grievously wronging the railroads in under-paying them for the carrying of the mails. The following is one of the strong points or arguments presented:

Furthermore, the railroads hold that an additional injustice was done in this connection in the adoption of the present methods of determining the weights. In addition to the several reductions from the act of 1873 above mentioned, and in spite of the fact that various government committees admitted their injustice, a singular order amounting practically to a juggling of weights in favor of the government was issued under the date of June 7, 1907.

Under the date of March 2, 1907, the following order was issued:

“When the weight of mail is taken on the railway routes, the whole number of days the mails are weighed shall be used as a divisor for obtaining the weight per day.”

But under date of June 7, 1907, a surprising order was issued reading as follows:

“When the weight of mail is taken on railway routes, the whole number of days included in the weighing period should be used as a divisor for obtaining the average weight per day.”