The Kalispell bee. [volume] (Kalispell, Mont.) 1900-192?, 1900-12-11
Is the Keynote Of Postmaster
Generals Report.
A GREAT CONVENIENCE
As Well as a Paying Proposition Enact
ment of the Land Bill Is
Again Urged.

washington, Dec. y. - postmaster
General Charles Emory Smith has
submitted his annual report to the
president. The financial operations
of the department for the last fiscal
year are shown in the following state
ment of revenues and expenditures:
Ordinary postal revenues, $100,S99,-
433; receipts from money order bust
ness, $1,455, 145. Total, $102,354,579.
Total expenditures for the year,
$107,74O,267. Excess of expenditures
over receipts, $5,3S5,SSS.
The deficit for the year 1S99-190O
is shown to be $10,O0S,OSO less than
last year. The estimated postal rev.
nue. for the fiscal year ending June 80,
1901, is $116,O33 ,O42, and the estimated
expenditure $121 1,276,349, leaving d
probable deficiency of $4,634,3O7.
Rural free delivery, the report says,
has proven to be "the most salient
significant and far reaching feature OF
postal development
Besides swelling the postal receipts
the values of farms are enhanced,
through the necessity 1or good roads
and the opportunity afforded the
farmer to keep abreast of the times
by being put in closer communication
with the outside world. The isolation
and monOtony which has been the
bane of country life, is sensibly miti-
gated through the effects of free rural
delivery in placing the farm within
daily range of the intellectual and
commercial centers. The farmer is
also given cause to feel he shares the
governmental advantages of the
town-man, which stimulates his loyal
ty and patriotism.
Rural free delivery is here plainly
to stay 1t reaches millions of peo-
pie scattered over a million acres of
territory to whose doors it is the task
of the government to arrange to carry
the mails through rural free delivery,
Postmaster General Smith says. BY
the end of the current fiscal year one
sixth of them shall have been served,
and 4,300 routes in operation. The
net annual cost OF a complete rural
free delivery system is estimated at
$13,7S2, 224. On this point the report
says:
1T will hardly be disputed that the
great result of carrying the postofflca
to every home, if it can be accomplish
ed at such comparatively small COST,
is an object we'll worth undertaking.
"This duty is emphasized and en-
forced when we consider some other
phases of the postal question. In my
last annual report it was shown that
If class of publications, which now
under an evasion of the purposes of
the law, pay the second class rate of
postage, were really made to pay the
third class rate, as they ought to do,
it would bring an additional revenue
to the government of $12,343,612. The
cost to the government of this abuse
is almost equivalent to the estimated
cost of broad national rural free deliy-
cry. and it the question between favor
ing a limited number of publishers and
favoring 21,OOO,OOO people who live
on the farms of the United States
there ought to be no hesitation in
serving the many, rather than the few.
The abuse should be uprooted as a
public duty; the national free deliv-
cry service should be undertaken as a
public policy, and when through the
overthrow of the wrong, the right can
be established without the slightest
additional burden the appeal becomes
irresistable.''