hours. I mention this particular date because it is fresh in my mind, but I could give you many others of like character; in fact it is a frequent occurrence at this postoffice." "Some two years ago I had a personal experience which cost me $40. I sent a telegram to the third assistant postmaster-general ordering 20,000 No. 5 2-cent envelopes, first quality, white. The envelopes came but were not first quality and were not white. An investigation showed that the telegraph company in transmitting the message left the words 'first quality' and 'white' out of the message, and the order was filled exactly as the message reached the third assistant postmaster-general with these words left out. The result was that I could not use the envelopes and the department simply redeemed them for their face value in 'postage stamps. The only thing for me to do was to grin and bear the loss. Of course the telegraph company were sorry,' so they informed me." 15 Do not imagine that the Western Union's program of bad service is completed by slowness, inaccuracy, and failure to transmit. There are other threads in the fabric of their disrepute as carriers of intelligence. "Grave difficulties have arisen from time to time between the government and the telegraph companies which have declined and still decline to furnish such facilities as are deemed essential to the perfect success of the signal service." 16 Hannibal Hamlin stated the insufficiency of the public service afforded by the telegraph companies, as one of three emphatic reasons which impelled him to advocate a government telegraph.17 The Western Union is not always satisfied with mere insufficiency of facilities for the public business. On the 4th of March, 1871, it suddenly terminated the transmission of weather reports over all its lines because of a misunderstanding as to the power of the federal authorities over the telegraph under the law of 1866, and it was nearly four months before it could be persuaded to resume business and allow the sailors, farmers, travellers, and general public to be informed as usual of coming storm or sunshine, thaw or freeze.18 15 Wanamaker 1890, p. 139. 16 P.-M. Genl. Creswell Nov. 15, 1872, p. 27. 17 Congressional Globe 42d Cong. 2d sess. p. 3554. The three reasons were: 1st, for the sake of the signal service which the Western Union does not properly serve although the government pays it $250,000 a year; 2d, for the sake of the low rates all the rest of the world enjoys, and 3d, for the sake of the postoffice system which may at any time be depleted by a strong telegraph in competent private hands. 18 The Committee on Commerce, Senator Chandler chairman, reported that "The sudden cessation of the telegraphic reports extending in their consequences to so many interests threatened to prove disastrous " (Sen. Rep. 223 42d-2d, June 1, 1872). Other companies helped the government out some, and finally on June 24, 1871, after a good deal of discussion the Western Union kindly consented to permit the P.-M. Genl. to fix the rates for government dispatches as is provided by the law under which the Western Union holds its right to do interstate business. Another sort of insufficiency in our telegraph service is strongly stated by Victor Rosewater, for seven years the Western Union manager at Omaha and a high authority as we have already had occasion to state in these papers. "One of the most significant facts in regard to the present condition of the telegraph service in this country, is that only one-fourth of the telegraph offices in this country are commercial offices, and the other three-fourths are railroad offices. The telegraph companies will not maintain offices at points where the income does not cover rent and the salary of the operator. The consequence is that the people in thousands of American towns are obliged to depend upon a service where the wires are constantly busy with the transmission of railroad service messages. The railroad operators are, as a class, not competent to handle commercial business, and the dispatches transmitted through railroad offices are frequently subjected to errors and ruinous delays. Now, in Great Britain and other European countries, the reverse is true. I found that there are three postal-telegraph stations to one railroad-telegraph station. In fact, the railroad wires are seldom used for commercial business. In nearly every village where there is a postoffice there is also a postal-telegraph office." 19 Our telegraph service is also poor because it is not properly coördinated with the telephone service, because old methods are used instead of the newest and best, because it is marred by unjust discrimination, and because it divulges the secrets entrusted to it. The first three points will be dealt with hereafter, but a word about the last may be useful here. If you impart a secret to a doctor or a lawyer professionally, you need not fear for its safety, but if you give it to the Western Union you might almost as well tell it to the town gossip or the new reporter on a city paper whose position and wages depend on the amount of sensational matter he can collect. Speculative operations largely depend on telegraphic · reports from Liverpool and New York. On the strength of dispatches men buy wheat by the hundred thousand dollars' worth. This is not commendable business, but it is none the less an outrage to take money from A for a private dispatch to himself when the information contained in it has already been peddled out to others. Yet this has been done not once merely but many times. "An operator in Chicago claims to have paid out $400 a week for dispatches from the Old World, and the wheat markets of this; and not long since he discovered that others had been getting the benefit of these dispatches before himself, and at much less cost than he was subjected to. In an attempt 10 The Voice, New York, Aug. 29, 1895, p. 1. For the reasons of the insufficiency of the ordinary railroad office for prompt and accurate commercial service see Bingham Co. 1890, Rosewater, p. 6. to solve the mystery of these dispatches, a decoy was sent. to Chicago from Milwaukee, instructions having been previously given by letter. At the Chicago office the dispatch was evidently given into other hands, for wheat advanced 3 cents a bushel at once, and the parties who secured the telegram lost $300,000 by their sharpness. A gentleman who knows whereof he speaks tells us that the contents of dispatches sent from this city by wheat men to the Northwest are frequently given to rival buyers who operate upon them." "20 Loud complaints have been made about the disclosure of political messages, and government business, even military dispatches in time of war. In 1894 Mr. Wilson said: "Suppose I transmit a confidential telegram relative to political matters of importance to myself. In the general judgment of the people of the West, such news as that now leaks like a sieve." 21 At the time of the Hayes canvass the governor of Florida complained that messages were exposed at Tallahassee to a leading Democratic politician.22 In 1889 the Western Union received $88,000 for selling election news to pool rooms, theatres, etc., the news being abstracted from messages sent over its wires by third parties, just as if the postoffice should select information of special interest from the letters that pass through its hands and sell it to pool-rooms, theatres, etc. Of the insecurity even of orders sent to the troops in time of war a flagrant instance was referred to by Mr. Albright in the second session of the 43d Congress. Important government dispatches ordering certain movements of Union troops were sent by Major-General McDowell to Captain Mills and other officers. Twenty-four hours before the dispatches were delivered to the addressees the contents of the messages had been given to the public in a garbled form for the sake of political effect, and the contemplated movements of the troops had to be countermanded.24 The contrast between our telegraphic service and that of Europe is not at all pleasing to American pride. President Francis Walker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the writer that he found the service in England and Germany much better than in the United 20 H. Rep. 114, pp. 11, 12. 21 Henderson Committee I. T. U. Hearings, p. 41. 22 Blair Com., vol. 1, p. 901. 23 Bingham Com. Rosewater, p. 3. 24 Congressional Record 43-2, p. 1422, States. Professor Simon Newcomb says that the telegraph service in the United States is the poorest in the world.25 And Professor R. T. Ely says, that "the contrast between the service in this country and the service in Germany is most painful to one who has lived in both countries,"26 and he specifies the facts that the offices are so frequently closed, that none exist in rural districts, that transmission is irregular and unreliable, and that inaccuracy in greater or less degree is the rule rather than the exception, all of which is the exact contrary of his experience with the German telegraph. Other evidence of the superior efficiency of the public telegraphs across the sea will be adduced when we come to speak specifically of the foreign telegraph. Now and then an individual worker will make a mistake or commit a wrong even when all the employees are chosen with care, well-trained, well-paid, and well-treated, but the multiplicity of errors, discriminations, delays, etc., that characterizes our telegraph service and distinguishes it in so marked a manner from the public service abroad, is due to the very nature of a selfish private monopoly. A private telegraph does not aim at service. It wants cheap labor, and that means inefficient labor. It abuses its employees, and they are consequently out of sympathy with their work, do not put their hearts into it nor give as good service even as they know how to give. The long list of imperfections in Western Union service results from the ill-treatment of employees, the lack of proper care in the use of the employing power, the policy of suppressing inventions, the absence of needful facilities, the false distribution of those that exist, and the ruling thirst for gain regardless of the public good. For every count in the indictment the management of the company is responsible. 25 Harvard Quarterly Jour. of Economics, July, '93. 20 ARENA, Dec. '95, p. 50. (To be continued.) REPRESENTATIVE WOMEN ON VITAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS. IS THE SINGLE TAX ENOUGH TO SOLVE THE LABOR PROBLEM? The opportunity to say a "last word" in answer to this question is offered me. On re-reading the papers of the symposium I find that the socialists answer "no," mainly because they cannot see: 1. That taking economic rent for common expenses will, by opening land to free settlement, raise the wages of labor at the margin of cultivation to a point ensuring comfort and leisure for itself, the base of the pyramid of human effort, and consequently for its whole superstructure. 2. That the relation of man to land on which and from which he must live, is the basic relation, and that no other problem relating to his material welfare can be rightly and permanently solved until that basic relation is justly established; that the problems involved in the private ownership of the ways for the transportation of persons and property and the transmission of intelligence will be solved by such just establishment; and that the money question is of secondary importance, and is one which will largely settle itself after the single tax has secured to the laborer the wealth he earns. 3. That the relation of labor to land remains the same under all systems of production, from the simplest to the most complex; the application of labor to land producing all wealth, first, by means of the bare hands of man, then with the aid of those first forms of capital, the pointed stick and sharpened stone, and finally by the marvellous modern machine. 4. And that, failing to understand this persistent relation, they cannot see how the making of it free and perfect will by natural process compel the just distribution of wealth, but are forced, in order to justify the unnatural distribution which they propose, to deny to men their place in the universe as conscious moral units, and to introduce a fourth factor into production by separating brain- from hand-work and calling it "ability." |