How about 300 pounds of second-class mail matter, say some monthly New York periodical? This is brought to the mail car, wrapped and directed to destination, Chicago for instance, to keep the comparison clear and fair. It is dumped on the floor in a corner of a mail car, with all the intermediate station deliveries atop of it or stacked about it, and at Chicago it is tumbled off to the publisher’s agent or salesman. That is all the service rendered by either the railroads or the Postoffice Department in handling that 300 pounds of second-class mail matter.
Yet the Postmaster General says it costs the government 9.23 cents a pound to render such service!
Is not that rather jarring to one’s exalted opinion of Mr. Hitchcock’s all-round, comprehending knowledge of a just and fair mail haulage rate? If it does not jar the reader he should take his thinking apparatus to the cobbler and have it half-soled.
A glance at freight schedules will show any reader that live stock, cattle, hogs or sheep, are carried from Chicago to New York, Boston or other eastern destination at only a small fraction of his dead-mail rate. Again, while double-deck live stock cars are in extensive use on long hauls, the stock is not corded up on the decks as much of the second-class mail is piled up. Not only that, but the live stock must be watered and fed in transit.
The rail rates for the carriage of dead-freight makes Mr. Hitchcock’s 9.23 cents a pound, which he figured as the cost to the government of carriage and handling second-class mail, read so absurd as to be a joke, were the purpose and purport of his statement not so grave and serious as they are. Even the 4-cent rate that he and a coterie of his friends tried to put over in the Senate rider—$80.00 a ton for carrying dead weights the average mail haul, and dumping it off at destination—is a ridiculous charge.
Why, the express companies are carrying hundreds of tons daily of dead-freight over such average haul for less than a cent a pound; yes, they are carrying tons of second-class mail matter and carrying it at one-half a cent a pound. It has been cited by Mr. Hearst and other publishers that certain railroads carry second-class mail matter over fast freight runs for about one-quarter of a cent a pound. In this connection another thought presents itself: Did, or did not, Mr. Hitchcock, at the time he was pushing his “rider” in the Senate, have any adequate knowledge of the amount, of second-class mail matter which publishers were then sending by express and fast freight? If he had such knowledge, then he must have known of the fact that thousands of tons of periodicals are now carried by the railroads and express companies at a rate lower than the government’s mail charge of one-cent a pound. If Mr. Hitchcock had such knowledge when he was handing his string-talk to President Taft, having his “heart-to-hearts” with certain senators, I wonder if he intimated to them what must necessarily happen to the second class mail division and to that deficit which, apparently at least, has so continuously, likewise so effusively and diffusively, worried him?
If the fast freights and express are now taking thousands of tons of second-class matter from the government in competition with the one-cent a pound rate, how many thousands of tons more would they take from the government if the latter advanced its rate to four cents a pound? And what effect would the withdrawal of so vast a tonnage from the government’s second-class service have upon the deficit our solicitous Postmaster General has kept himself so exercised about—that $6,000,000, or, to be exact, using Mr. Hitchcock’s own figures, $5,881,481.95? That deficit, if converted into cash, would barely furnish parade money to our army for a month. If the Atlantic squadron undertook a junket with such financial backing its progress would probably end by rounding the Statue of Liberty at the entrance of New York harbor. If Mr. Hitchcock’s attempt to put up a four-cent rate on periodicals had succeeded, thus forcing the prominent publishers to find cheaper means of carriage and distribution, his $6,000,000 would have soared upward to a point making it worth very serious consideration.
DEFICITS AFFECTED BY SECOND-CLASS TONNAGE.
In this connection I desire to show that deficits in the federal postal service are largely governed by the tonnage of second-class matter carried, the greater such tonnage the smaller the deficit. To do this I shall take the liberty to quote from the “Inland Printer,” probably the most widely read periodical among the printing crafts, as it certainly is one of the best informed and most carefully edited journals of any in matters relating to the publication and distribution of periodical literature. The article speaks of several points pertinent to our subject and is so instructively written that I know my readers will appreciate it in its entirety. If the publishers of the periodical will pardon my wholesale appropriation of their article, I am confident my readers will do the same. The article is of date March, 1911, and was written by Wilmer Atkinson, whose permission I should also ask for reprinting it in toto:
In 1860 the postal deficit was $10,652,543; in 1910 it was $5,848,566. The postage rate was four times greater in 1860 than now.