But, gentlemen, what are the chances that a sufficient number of your fellow-countrymen can be brought into accord with you--not merely in their intellectual convictions, but in convictions, intellectual and emotional, so strong that they can be transmuted into a sufficient number of votes in the ballot box to make our lawmakers at Washington give heed--at least in the immediate future? For the problem of the express companies will come up for adjudication, temporary or long-enduring, within some months, or at least within a year or two. Obviously, the present status of the express companies, as described below, will end soon after the war. And Government ownership of the express service, as has been indicated, is so infinitely more advantageous than private ownership, that if Government ownership can be obtained only by your (and my) method, and if we divide our ranks by refusing to support any other method short of one vicious in both principle and practice, the country may return once more to the private express company method. As has been indicated, the whole problem concerns scarcely ten or twenty millions of dollars in a business whose operations amount to more than two hundred millions; and whatever method be adopted, it can hardly effect a difference of 5% one way or another in express rates. If the question were one similar to the Government ownership of railroads, it would indeed be worth delay to obtain a comprehensively adequate method of taking them over by the Government, for marked differences in rates would then result. But the differences in express rates involved in different methods of purchasing the companies would hardly recompense for the delay involved in the postal service's mastery of a new technique, in its assimilation of details which can be mastered only through experience, in tedious litigation, in political wirepulling and manipulation, and in determination of constitutionality, all of which features will accompany the establishment of a new Government postal express independent of the present express companies.
For, by the time that the dissolution of the American Railway Express Company (see below) will come up for final decision, new equipment and the materials for new equipment will still be scarce, very scarce, and very costly in the United States. It would be unfairly prejudicial to an infant Government postal express service if it were hampered by scarcity or high cost of equipment. Indeed, in the long run, in an industrial situation which for many months after peace will be unsettled as a result of the war, it might even be more economical to purchase the express companies outright. And if once the express service is released to its former owners, the difficulty of prying it loose again will involve far greater loss than the loss in adopting even the least justifiable method of consolidating it in the Postal Service.