The Committee on Railway Mail Pay, representing railways whose lines include ninety-two per cent. of the aggregate length of all railway mail routes in the United States, believes that the payments to the railways for the services and facilities furnished by them to the Post Office Department are, and for a long time have been, unjustly low. This pamphlet contains a concise statement of the facts which prove that this belief is warranted and, incidentally, a refutation of the estimates made by the Postmaster-General, and reported to the Congress (House Document No. 105, Sixty-second Congress, first session), which led him to conclude that the basis of payment could now properly be changed so as to accomplish a present reduction of about twenty per cent. It will be shown that although the insufficient data and the erroneous methods employed by the Postmaster-General resulted in his making estimates of cost to the railways that are far below the real cost, his own figures and calculations, when properly analyzed and supplemented, demonstrate that the mail service has not been fairly remunerative to the railways.

Before proceeding to this demonstration it should, however, be noted that—