Newspapers / The Carolina Union Farmer … / June 27, 1912, edition 1 / Page 4
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Page Four TilE CAROLINA UNION FARMER [Thursday, June ^7, 1912. When We Get the Parcels Post. How Packages Weighing Eleven Pounds May be Sent Long Distances by Mail at Trifling Cost in Germany, France, England, South Africa, China, and-Some Day—in the United States, Frank Parker Stockrldge in World’s Work. If you happen to live in Phillips- town, U. S. A., and want a dozen fresh-laid eggs every day direct from a farmer, the easiest and cheapest way to get them is to have the farm er send them to you by the newly- established “agricultural parcels post.” A dozen eggs weigh about a pound. If the package does not weigh more than an addditional quarter-pound, the postage will be six cents, in any kind of postage stamps. Or if you want a couple of pounds of butter, a pot of jam, a jar of honey, a pair of tender young “broilers,” or a fat duck, your farm er can wrap them up, put the neces sary stamps on them, hand them to the rural carrier the next time that functionary passes, and the parcel will be delivered to you as fast as the mails can carry it. And if your farmer wants tea or tobacco, garden seeds or a cake of yeast, he can tele phone or write to the store-keeper at Phillipstown and have the articles mailed at the same rate of postage —six cents for anything up to a pound and a quarter, sixteen cents for a package from three to six pounds in weight, twenty cents if it be more than six and less than nine pounds, and twenty-four cents for any heavier package up to eleven pounds. That’s what you can do if you live in Phillipstown, U. S. A.—Union of South Africa. But if you live in Phillipstown in our U. S. A.,—Unit ed States of America—^you can’t do anything of the kind. To be sure, there are rural carriers traveling once, twice, or three times a day between most of our postofflces and the outlying farms—42,000 of them, covering about a million miles of roads every day, in vehicles per fectly able to take loads of from 100 to 200 pounds over the average road. But they start out from their respec tive postoffices with average loads of twenty-five pounds and return with practically no loads at all. For in the United States of America we haven’t any kind of parcels post at all, except a service that costs so much nobody uses it for anything weighing more than an ounce or two, that limits the weight of parcels car ried to a trifling maximum, and that bars from the mails entirely the eggs and butter, honey and jam, and broilers and ducks that the people of Phillipstown, Union of South Africa, can have sent in from the farm, whenever they" want them. For the United States Postoffice charges sixteen cents a pound post age and limits packages to four pounds. So the farmer does not use the mails for his packages. But he does use the rural mall carrier enough to show that a parcels post would be a great service to him; for if he wants packages that are un mailable or heavier than the four- pound limit delivered to him by rural carrier, he can get them—provided the person who is sending them to ,him first takes them to the postoffice for the postmaster’s inspection, to make sure there is no reasonable ex cuse for charging postage on them and provided the postmaster then gives his permission for the carrier to take them, and provided the car rier is willing to perform the service and does not charge too heavy a fee for it. But that is the nearest ap proximation we have to any kind of parcels post. Even under these con ditions there were 138,490 packages carried by Rural Free Delivery car riers outside the mails, in the month of January, 1910, of a total weight of 914,318 pounds and nine ounces. Nobody knows how much the carriers charged for this service. Whatever profit there was in it went into their pockets. They alone were responsi ble to the shippers and the con signees, and the Government’s only concern was to see that they did not carry anything on which, under the postal laws and regulations, a tax of 16 cents a pound could be levied. South Africa is a long way off, however, and there are other aspects of the parcels post besides the agri cultural one. The shipments of mer chandise, gifts, personal effects from city to city is as necessary in mod ern civilization as is the transporta tion of commodities to 'and from the farm. England isn’t as far away as South Africa. How do they solve the problem there? By the general parcels post. Any thing and everything, up to eleven pounds’in weight and with some rea sonable restrictions of the methods of packing and of the bulk of the packages, is carried in the mails— collected ffom boxes or postal sta tions and elivered at your house just like letters—at rates that begin at 6 cents for a single pound and end with 22 cents for 11 pounds. But the British Islands are a small coun try, you may say, and the distances are short. Well, the British Post- office will carry an 11-pound package 700 miles for 22 cents—as far as from New York to Cincinnati. An American wishing to send the same weight of merchandise 700 miles can ship it by express for from 75 cents up. Or, if it can be divided into two 4-pound packages and one 3-pound package, he can send it by mail for $1,76, whether it is to go from Bos ton to San Francisco or from New York to Jersey City. And if you think it is no concern of Americans what the British Postoffice does for the people of the United Kingdom, ponder the fact that the British ship per can address a package to any point in the United States, drop it in the British malls, and have it deliver ed at its destination in the United States whether that be Sitka or Sias- conset, for 61 cents for a 3-pound parcel, 85 cents for a 7-pound par cel, or $1.09 for an 11-pound parcel From the port of New York, how ever ,the British parcels post is han died in the United States by the American Express Company, which carries the packages for the foreign Government for 24 cents, while charging American up to $1.65 for the same service. In sending par cels the other way, however, the charges are entirely different. If an American takes an 11-pound parcel into any American postoffice, he can send it to England for $1.32 instead of $1.09, or for 12 cents a pound, but he cannot mail it any price from one American postoffice to another. Perhaps they order these things better in Germany. In some respects that is true. A-person can go shop ping in Berlin and have his purchases sent home by parcels post, eleven pounds for six cents, if the distance is ten miles or less; for twelve cents if it is more than ten miles—and there are air-line distances of 85( miles in Germany. But the service of the Imperial German Parcels Post does not stop there. You may adc weight to the pacel up to a limit of 110 pounds—actually ship live dogs, goats, bicycles, baby-carriages—any thing that will go into a railroad car and does not weigh more than 110 pounds, by mail. The additional postage charges for weights above eleven pounds are arranged on a zone system, beginning with a trifle less than half a cent a pound for 46 miles and running up to about 5% cents a pound for distances more than 692 miles, for the additional weight. Nor does the Imperial Ger man Parcels Post—a wonderfully ef ficient institution against which there IS no private competition—stop there For the benefit of the German shipper it carries his parcels to America and delivers them for him to the address es in New York City, in Brooklyn, Jersey City, or Hoboken with its own wagons, for a maximum charge of 88 cents for an 11-pound parcel from any point in Germany. The blue- painted wagon of the Imperial Ger man Parcels Post may be seen any day in the streets of New York, deliv ering packages that have been car ried possibly 800 miles by rail and certainly 3,000 miles by water, at a total cost of eight cents a pound, though the resident of Hoboken must pay sixteen cents a pound to his own postoffice to send a package across the North River, a scant mile. And if the German package is destined for an interior point, the express com pany takes it for an additional 24 cents to any part of the United States. The United States is a big country, and it probably would not be feasi ble to make a general parcels post rate on the basis of that of Belgium, for Instance, where a package of 132 pounds is carried anywhere by post for 22 cents, with an extra charge of only 6 cents for house-tohouse collection and delivery and 10 cents more for fast train service. But so is Australia a big country—not so very much smaller than the United States of America—and there one can send parcels of a pound for 12 cents, and 6 cents added for each added pound. Pluropean Russia is more than two-thirds as large as the United States and a postage charge of 34 cents carries an 11-pound package by mail tb any part of it, and 95 cents will carry the same par cel from St. Petersburg to Sagha- lien Island, off the eastern coast of Siberia, or to any other point in the Russian Empire. And by paying at approximately the same rate for the additional weight one may post par cels up to 120 pounds in the Russian postoffice and they will be delivered. And If the area covered has any bear ing on the question, consider China, half as large again as the United States, with its pacels post rate of a dollar for twenty-two pounds any where In the Republic—or Empire whichever it may happen to be when this is published. W’hy AVc Haven’t Got It. The question naturally arises. If the parcels post works to the advan tage of the public in these countries and the rest of the civilized nations of the world, which all have it, why do we not have it in the United States? Mr. Wanamaker, more than twenty years ago, answered that question. He said, in one of his re ports as Postmaster-General, that there were four reasons why we did not have the parcels post—the Adams Express Company, the Amer lean Express Company, the United States Express Company, and Wells, Fargo and Company’s Express. With ten express companies now doing business, as against four then, there would seem to be a multiplicity of reasons against the parcels post. But two ^things have happened that had not occurred in Mr. Wanamaker’s day in office. Rural free delivery has been established by the post- office, and the express companies have been placed under the jurisdic tion of the Interstate Commerce Commission. And because of these things, we are going to have the par cels post in the United States—some time. Believing in the parcels post, President Taft has recommended it. In a special message to Congress last .December he proposed, as a prelimi nary step, that it should be establish ed on certain selected rural free de- ivery routes, and that is the way in which it probably will be started. That is the way Postmaster-General Hitchcock wants to try it out. Mr. Hitchcock can hardly be accused of being a parcels post enthusiast. He sees obstacles to the collection and delivery of parcels in the big cities for instance. Likewise, he does not believe in cheap postage, as a gen eral rule. But in his last annual re port he advocated the rural free de- ivery parcels post, and in his testi- money before the Senate Committee on Postoffices and Post Roads, on November 13, 1911, he said; "1 favor making a begiuumg on the rural routes, but tuat be ginning should be‘ followed as rapidly as possible with an ex tension of the parcels post sys tem to other branches of the postal system. My plan was to start with the rural routes, fol low that almost immediately with delivery in the carrier ser vice in cities and towns, and af ter those two branches of the service were organized, to take over the railway-express busi ness, thus making a general sys tem.” Mr. Hitchcock suggested a rate of twelve cents a pound, with a mini mum charge of twelve cents, as a general parcels-post rate, limited to 11-pound parcels. Congress wants the pacels post, the public want it. Farmers, vil lagers, city dwellers, business men—- excluding certain well-fined classes which will be more specifically iden tified later—want it—The National Grange and most of the State granges have indorsed it. Labor organiza tions and woman suffrage associa tions and consumers’ leagues and dozens of other organizations com posed of ordinary, average citizens have sent delegations to Washington to demand the pacels post as a mat ter of right and justice, as a means toward keeping the cost of living down and making it possible for more people to live In the country by establishing better communica tion between country and city. Its Enemies. Why do we not have the parcels post, then? One of the chief objec tions to the establishing of it is the argument of “paternalism.” Individ ualists contend that the Government has no right to take over what can be done, by private enterprise. This objection, however, is losing much of its force by the mere passage of time. Another potent stock argument is that the express companies are do ing the carrying business cheaper than the Government can possibly do it. The first step toward the explos ion of this argument was taken when the express companies were placed under the jurisdiction of the Inter- State Commerce Commission by the Hepburn Rate Law of 1906. Accord ing to their own figures, the entire plants and equipments of the ten ex press companies doing business the United States, including all their real estate holdings, could be dupl^' cated for $29,962,373. That sum represents, however, the investment of earnings and not of original capt' tal, of which it is doubtful if much as $1,000,000 was ever invest ed. The express companies colle^^^' ed among them in the fiscal y®®*" ending in 1911, $141,791,975 gr®®®
The Carolina Union Farmer (Charlotte, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
June 27, 1912, edition 1
4
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