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.

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.