Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

I shall now present a few statements from the report of that commission, first quoting some of the arguments presented by publishers who appeared at its hearings personally or by representatives, or who presented their views in writing on the various phases of the questions under consideration. The quotations made, the reader must understand to be the commission’s summary of what the publishers testified to, criticised or recommended, and not the full testimony or reports as made by the publishers.

I have taken the liberty to italicize certain phrases and sentences in these quotations, my purpose being, of course, to bring the points so italicized more particularly to the reader’s notice:

The primary purpose and function of the postal service being the transportation of government and letter mail, second, third, and fourth class matter are not strictly chargeable with that proportion of the total cost of the service which would be equivalent to their proportion of total weight or volume, but these secondary classes, on the contrary, are chargeable only with that fraction of total cost which would remain after deducting all expenses of installation and general management involved in the maintenance of a complete postal service for government and letter mail. This method of computation should be applied not only in respect of the expenses of administration and handling, but especially in respect of the expense of railway mail transportation, in which, by reason of the sliding scale of payment, the additional burden of second-class matter entailed but an infinitesimal additional cost. As an illustration of this point, attention was drawn to the statement of Dr. Henry C. Adams, in his report to the commission of 1898 (p. 404), that if the volume of mail had been decreased so that the ton-mileage had been 169,809,000 instead of 272,000,000, the railway mail pay would have been practically the same.

In other words, the argument is that the true cost of second-class matter is merely that part of total cost which would be saved if second-class matter were now eliminated.

The foregoing is from page 9 of the commission’s report. On the same page of the report it gives a summary of another set of reasons presented by the publishers in their argument in support of their contention that the mail rate on second-class matter should be low:

That second-class matter, by reason of the fact that it is handled largely in bulk in full sacks already routed and separated and requires little or no handling by the railway mail service or the force at the office of mailing and of delivery, is in fact the least expensive class of matter. With respect to the proportion so routed and separated, it was variously estimated by the publishers as from 70 to 93 per cent of the total weight. The assistant postmaster at New York fixed the percentage for his office at 67 per cent, and the assistant postmaster at Chicago estimated it, for the country at large, to be between 50 and 60 per cent.

The representative of the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association, speaking for the metropolitan daily press, stated that less than 6 per cent of their circulation went into the mail at all, in many instances the proportion being as low as two-thirds of 1 per cent; that the radius of circulation was not more than 150 miles; that their mailings averaged 49 pounds per sack, and that 93 per cent of all second-class matter going out of New York city, for example, was already sorted and routed. It was admitted, however, that while the newspapers avail themselves of express and railway transportation for matter sent out in bulk, single copies sent to individual subscribers invariably went by mail.

Postmaster General Hitchcock appears to have largely ignored the fact so clearly pointed out by the publishers in 1906—yes, pointed out as long ago as 1898—that second-class mail matter is a large producer of the revenues received by the government from mail matter of the first, third and fourth classes. Following is a summary of what the publishers pointed out to the 1906-7 commission: