THE POST OFFICE
The common belief that the Post Office Department is conducted
along approved business methods is sought to be dissipated.
The advocates of government ownership continually remind you that the
Post Office Department is a government managed affair. It is, and I
think I am perfectly safe in saying that until the government took
control of the railroads, cables, telegraph and telephone lines,
commenced building ships and constructing airplanes, it was the worst
managed institution on the face of the earth. And it has mattered
little, if any, which political party has had control of its affairs.
For six years every new post office erected in the United States has
borne upon its corner stone this inscription: “William G. McAdoo,
Secretary of the Treasury.” As you have seen this evidence of official
prominence in city after city in every state of the Union, have you
wondered why the name of the Postmaster General did not appear above,
or below, or at least on the rear of the building? It is simply because
the Postmaster General has nothing in the world to do with the
selection of sites, erection of buildings, or in their care or
improvement. The Treasury Department buys and pays for the sites,
prepares the plans, erects the buildings, repairs them, lights them,
heats and janitors them. It also pays the rent of post office quarters
where the government has not been as yet foolish enough to build. The
Treasury Department also audits the accounts of all postmasters and not
one dollar of all this expense is charged to postal receipts. Even the
salary of the Postmaster General and all his clerks is paid from
appropriations independent of postal revenues. Then, with no rent to
pay, no coal or current to buy, with janitor and elevator service
gratis and accounts audited, the Post Office Department has run behind
an aggregate of something over two hundred million dollars. Any express
company would be glad to take the Post Office Department off the hands
of the government if it could have free rent, free coal, the salaries
of their principal officers paid and all their accounts audited gratis,
for sixty-five per cent of what it now costs the government to take
care of our mail service.
RIVERS AND HARBORS
Under the Constitution, Congress has charge of all navigable streams
and harbors and it has spent billions in their improvement. Colonel
Hepburn once made the statement on the floor of the House that the
appropriations for the improvement of the channel of the Mississippi
River between St. Louis and the Gulf were sufficient to have built a
ship canal of boiler iron between these two points. No one ever
questioned the correctness of the statement.
A recent River and Harbor bill contained an appropriation to dredge the
channel of a stream in Texas where the government’s engineers reported
there was only one inch of water. Another brook in Arkansas with only
six inches of water, got an appropriation. I assume that two more votes
were necessary. I might add for the reader’s information that any
stream in the United States can be made navigable in law by a joint
resolution of the two Houses of Congress saying that it is navigable.
Lawyers would call that navigable _de jure_ but many of them cannot be
made navigable _de facto_ however much is expended in dredging and
widening.