Postal officials have exhausted conjecture as a basis for a correct solution of this problem. Nearly every year there has been a new guess. Mr. Madden, Third Assistant Postmaster-General for seven years up to 1907, guessed that it cost 4 cents a pound. His successor, Mr. Lawshe, guessed 2½ cents and then the next year 4 cents. For the last two years the Department’s guess has been 9 cents.
The Penrose-Overstreet Commission declared, while it is impossible to ascertain with certainty what the cost is, the members of the Commission gave it as their opinion that “_One cent a pound is approximately adequate compensation for handling and transporting second-class matter._”
I am confident that there is a better way of solving the problem than has heretofore been tried. This consists in the direct application of plain, old-fashioned common sense to it. A little gumption in such a matter as this is far better than fanciful guessing or astute figuring by experts, who are bent on finding something that is not there.
In working out this problem I have adopted a method quite different and have obtained results quite unlike the foregoing. I show the relation of second-class mail to stamp mail extending over a period of 25 years, from 1885 to 1910. This covers the entire period since the institution of the cent a pound rate.
I go back still further to 1876 when the postage rate on newspapers was 4 times greater than now, when the sale of stamps was less than one-eleventh what it is now, _and while deficits were larger_.
The highest point reached in the weight of second-class matter previous to the institution of the present rate, was 101,057,963 pounds.
It has been repeatedly declared officially that second-class matter originates large quantities of other classes of mail, and in the official figures we have the proof.
While population increased from 1885 to 1910 only a little more than double, the revenue from the sale of stamps, etc., and the weight of second-class matter, each increased over 5 times. _No other possible reason can be assigned for the increase in stamp mail, and the tremendous development of every branch of the postal business 5 times faster than the growth of population, than the increased circulation and influence of the newspaper and periodical press, brought about by the reduced postage rate._