6. The Postoffice Department is not understood--is not even thought of by intelligent citizens--as a _revenue-producing_ department. It _is_ understood to be a _service_ department, and the citizen--His Majesty, the American Citizen--is always willing to pay for services rendered.
7. The Postoffice Department has not in the period named--no, not for thirty or thirty-five years--_rendered the citizen the service for which he paid_.
I mean by that, of course, that the citizen has been compelled to pay far more for a postal service than he _should have paid for that service_.
8. Had that service been _honestly, faithfully and efficiently rendered_, the price the citizen has paid for it _would have left no deficit for any year within the past thirty_.
9. _The only deficits in those thirty or thirty-five years have been the result of manipulated bookkeeping, of political trenching into the revenues of the department, of loose methods in its management, of disinterest in the enforcement of even loose methods, and of downright lootage and stealings._
“Rather harsh that, is it not?” asks one.
To the first I need only say that this is an age not congenial to milk-poultice talk. I have previously expressed my opinion on that point. If you have a thing to say, say it _hard_. The majority of people will then understand you. Those who do not understand you can continue their milk poultices--or believe and talk as they are told _or are paid to believe and talk_.
The latter--the reader who yodles that my preceding nine statements appear to be assertions only--can make a courteous and, possibly, a profitable use of an hour’s leisure in reading a few following pages, before he _rusts_ into the belief that those nine “assertions” are groundless assertions.
In showing that there is no “deficit”--a shortage of receipts in the Postoffice Department over its legitimate expenditures--I shall not take my nine statements up seriatim, but present my reasons in a general way for having made such blunt declarations. I may go about that, too, in an awkward way, but the reader who follows me will get my reasons for making those nine declarations.
NO CREDIT ALLOWED FOR SERVICES RENDERED OTHER DEPARTMENTS.