Seventy-Tiiikd Annual Report 1249 



opinions of the parcel post which it might be well for him to 

 amplify for us. 



Mk. Tuttle : Parcel post is not helping the producers at all. 

 For instance, suppose jou want to send a head of cauliflower to 

 New York City. It would cost about 24 cents postage to send the 

 head, and if you want 10 cents profit, that would be 34 cents. For 

 a dozen eggs I get 42 cents to-day. If I want to put up one case of 

 eggs the postage on it would be 12 cents, and that would be 54 

 cents. They can buy them cheaper. You cannot use parcel post 

 effectively as it now stands. 



Mr. Cowles : I should like to say a word on that subject. The 

 trouble with parcel post is that it is not intended to serve the 

 public. If any of you have read Mr. Bourne's argument in favor 

 of it you would have heard him say it was entirely satisfactory to 

 the railroads and to the express companies. I happen to know 

 something about this thing because they call me the father of par- 

 cel post. Two years ago Congressman Sulzer of this state intro- 

 duced a bill in Congress, at my request, to give us a parcel post 

 in this country equal to that which had been given to other coun- 

 tries. At that time an Englishman, German or Italian could send 

 11-pound packages of their merchandise at eight cents a pound. 

 I knew from the character of the committees I could not get any- 

 thing better. So Mr. Sulzer introduced a bill giving us eleven 

 cents a pound. I had some discussion with the chairman of the 

 committee and he said to me : " If you are going to have eleven 

 pounds, why not have fifty or two hundred pounds ? The post 

 office is our mutual express company, the greatest cooperative 

 association that ever came into existence. It is yours and mine; 

 ours to employ, ours to extend, and up to its limits it gives abso- 

 lute equality of transportation rates and transportation privileges 

 to every person and every place within its jurisdiction. And the 

 reason why we have such a humbug parcel post is, because the 

 railroads and express companies realized that something had to be 

 done. They arranged this thing to make it just as ugly as possi- 

 ble, so as to put off the time when a bill should be passed such as 

 we have to-dav. There are two bills before Congress to-dav. One 

 of them is a bill which was previously introduced in 1897 and it 

 provided for a parcel post such as you would like to have, with all 



