But material gains may not be the summum bonum of the express business.
The express service is much more than an important business undertaking,
and it is much more even than a valuable agent in quickening the
industrial activities of the United States--it is, or rather it can be,
one of the most serviceable media for the development of an American
culture as that culture expresses itself in the economic processes of
the nation. The future of the nation's express service is basically a
problem of national morale. In the decades before April 6, 1917, there
was no United States esprit, no United States national life, no United
States unity. There were only separatist esprits; there was only class
life; there was only geographical unity. The war found us an
unintegrated miscellany, and our Government a creature strangely and
even desirably aloof from the thoughts and aspirations of our daily
lives. And now, almost overnight, sacrifice in France and at home has
welded us into one people. Shall we remain one, or shall we revert to
factions, to factions either at loggerheads with one another, or else
indifferent one to the other? Assuredly we shall soon re-degenerate into
warring factions unless our still largely inchoate strivings for
national unity can discover vehicles to carry them forward. A Government
which has become truly a people's Government will long continue in the
United States only as it draws unto itself and maintains both the
material and the immaterial agencies which dive down to the depths of
our national daily existence and bind us together. More powerfully than
any other of these forces, our vast public utilities can, as an integral
part of the Government, retain our Government as the hub of our
universe. And although of all the public utilities the railroads
undoubtedly present the most hopeful source of this re-vitalization of
our national life, yet a Government express service can also help in no
small degree, both in itself and as a sharer in the entire general urge
towards a democratically-socialized state, to preserve and even to
invigorate the national morale.
And the future of the express service concerns not only national morale,
but also individual morale. Aside from a few serviceable and hitherto
usually unappreciated social servants, whether in private or in public
bodies, success in America has lain along the lines of private
enterprise for private gain. For the first time, a widespread summons
for service to the people has been able during the nineteen months of
war to supplant in the hearts of our most capable administrators the
summons to exploitation of the people. For nineteen months they have
subordinated self and enthroned society. Shall we send them back to the
limbo of self-aggrandizement or shall we carve out new paths for the
development of character in our American citizens? For obviously the
decades immediately at hand are to witness also a direct growth of the
control of the workers over their industry, whether it be private or
public industry. Who can hope to measure the gain in individual morale
when a man realizes that his own advancement depends upon the extent to
which he can serve others, not upon the extent to which he can serve
himself; when such a public utility as the express companies is in the
hands of administrators who have turned their attention away from
endeavors to derive as high rates as possible from the public to
endeavors to charge the public as low a rate as possible? If we hope to
keep unnarrowed, and even to broaden, the present fields in which
opportunity is given our fellow-citizens to devote their lives primarily
to their fellows' service rather than primarily to their own gain, any
national activity as socially-necessary and as nationally-significant as
the express companies must inevitably revert in ownership to the nation
to whose needs it ministers, and the men and women within the machinery
of its operation must serve owners who are not a handful of individuals,
but the people, all the people who make up America.