The railway mail clerks of England, Germany and France not only get full pay while laid up from temporary injury, the same as do our rail postal men, but their governments pay those “cheap foreigners” a pension when they get old or are permanently injured—pay it for the remaining years those “cheap” mail handlers live!
Among the most brazen, yet most frequently used, objections to a cheap and serviceable parcels post is that it would “benefit but very few people in the country’s vast population,” or other vocalized breath of similar purport and purpose.
Objectors who use this argument belong to one of two classes: They are either fools or think you are, or they are men whose sense of the right and wrong of things, commonly designated as conscience, got lost in their transit from diapers to dress suits.
The “argument” is not worth a line of consideration were it not so frequently used by objectors of the two classes just indicated. A man—a full-sized man—who can give it more than a smile ought to hire a janitor and a couple of scrub women to clean up his garret and dust off its furnishings.
But, seriously speaking, let’s think a moment about “the few” people who would be benefited by a cheap parcels post service.
There are 95,000,000 or more folks in this country.
There are about 36,000,000 of that number engaged in farming, farm labor, stock-raising and other agricultural occupations, counting the dependent families.
Counting the dependent families. Those “few” would be benefited, would they not?
Counting wives and babies, there are somewhere around 22,000,000 of our folks engaged in the mechanical trades and manufacturing.