The proposition to erect a competitive governmental telegraph line between Washington and New York, as described in the paper of Mr. Washburne, and the bill designed to authorize it, is a scheme founded upon no public necessity, unjust and delusive.
It is easily demonstrable that the tariff proposed by the bill, if adopted by the government, could only be maintained by large drafts upon the national treasury. It is well known that the active hours of telegraph service are about five, and the ordinary average of transmission not over fifty messages per hour, the general allowance being forty. Thus each of the four wires proposed to be erected under the bill would be capable of earning, at the maximum, five dollars per hour, or a total daily income of one hundred dollars, an amount unequal to the provision of the most ordinary indoor service, to say nothing of the cost of management, repairs of lines, battery power, stationery, and many other necessary expenses. The annual cost to our company of repairs and inspection on this route alone is $20,000.
This company denies the exorbitance of the rates it has adopted, and which it is now actively engaged in modifying so as to secure the fairest correspondence to other branches of labor, and the utmost development of the system. It therefore deprecates as illusory, as well as unjust, the proposal to establish rates lower than those which in Belgium have caused a loss of one third of the tariff on each message sent, and which, under the management of a department now showing an enormous annual deficit, cannot fail to prove perplexing and disastrous. It deprecates also, as utterly illusory, the idea that under such tariffs a product would be realized that would provide for the extension of the government lines to other regions. This delusion, which makes it possible for an intelligent public man to predicate so absurd a result, has for a basis that which is ever used to allure men into schemes of promised wealth. The insane speculation which, thirty years ago, ruined tens of thousands of our people, by counting the leaves of the Morus multicaulis as the products of veritable mulberry-trees, on which delighted caterpillars would feed, and enrich their owners with untold webs of native silk, was not more illusory than that which to-day, by showing the possibilities of each hour by day and night, crams the wires with possible messages which will never be sent, and estimates balances which cannot be earned.
This scheme would be unjust to government, by undermining and perilling a business which pays $300,000 per annum to its revenues, besides casting upon a nation, great because of the energy which has characterized its private enterprises, the odium of initiating competition with one of the most useful products of the national brain, before time has been given to complete the design of those who direct it, and to fully illustrate its capacity.
The policy and practice of the Western Union Telegraph Company favor a reduction of the rates on despatches as rapidly as the necessary expenses of the service will admit; and if the government will abolish its tax on the receipts for transmitting telegrams, this company will immediately lower its rates until the reduction upon the gross amount of business done shall be twice as much as the tax remitted.
This would lessen the rates for telegraphing nearly ten per cent, and would be a far better plan for furnishing cheaper telegraphic facilities to the people than the construction and operation of government lines at the expense of the national treasury.
THE TELEGRAPH BILL PROPOSED TO BE ENACTED BY CONGRESS WITHOUT NATIONAL EXAMPLE.
It must be borne in mind that the remunerativeness of telegraph lines depends largely upon the revenues of a few important cities, without which the enterprise would not have an income sufficient to support it. To take away the receipts of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, with Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and a few others of like importance, would make it impossible for any company to maintain itself, far less to meet the constant demand of an enlarging population and new settlements for the extension of its lines. This is not peculiar to America. In Great Britain, where there are 2,151 stations, seventy-six per cent of the entire receipts are received at 18 stations, fifteen per cent at 81 stations, and only nine per cent at the residue. Even of the seventy-six per cent received at the 18 stations, one half of that whole percentage was received in London, and one quarter from two other cities.
In France, three departments collect 4,178,332, out of a total of 7,707,590 francs per annum; and of this amount, Paris (Départment de la Seine) collects 2,794,768.40 francs, being more than one third of the total receipts of the whole empire.
The Western Union Telegraph Company’s revenues come to it in a similar manner. From its 3,331 offices it derives its receipts as follows:—