immense saving wherever the plan is put into effect, and in no instance is it considered an expense.

The postal employee is particularly interested in this question, for the reason that his wage is small and, with the increased cost of living, he has no opportunity to save anything for his old age and its infirmities. There have been many examples brought forcibly to my attention that makes me pause and wonder what we are to do with the superannuated men in the Postal Service. These faithful veterans have given the best that was in them to the service; they are responsible in no small degree for the many improvements that have been incorporated in the service and for the progress that it has necessarily made in keeping pace with the large and rapid growth of this great country of ours.

The Griffin bill, H. R. 6915, that is now receiving the consideration of this committee, should be favorably reported by the Post Office and Post Roads Committee so that an opportunity for voting on this important proposition may be had. I predict its passage if an opportunity is had by the members of registering a vote upon this question. That there is pressing need for this legislation can not be gainsaid, and the ranks of the postal employees are filled with living arguments for the necessity of prompt action.

I am convinced that this question is one that requires immediate attention. To turn these men out in the street without proper provision for their care during the declining years of their lives would be an act unworthy of this great Government, which boasts of liberty, equal rights, and protection to all, and would be a poor reward for the conscientious, loyal, and faithful service the postal employees give so freely to the public.

Mr. McLEMORE, M. C., of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I am in favor of the bill, and I would like to make a little statement.

Mr. Chairman, I wish to record my hearty indorsement of this measure (H. R. 6915), known as the Griffin bill. I believe the measure to be highly meritorious and I also believe its enactment into a law will mean justice to those who are now being dealt with unjustly as servants of the Government. I trust that the committee will report the bill favorably, and I am constrained to believe that it will do so as a matter of simple justice to a large number of deserving people, and because it will also be a matter of economy on the part of the Government.

Mr. SWIFT, M. C., of New York. I desire to state that I am heartily in favor of this bill, and desire an opportunity to file a statement later.

Mr. CALDWELL, M. C., of New York. Mr. Chairman, I have been asked by Mr. Van Dyke, who can not come here, on account of holding a subcommittee hearing, of which he is chairman, and file with this committee some expression of opinion from the district that he represents, and on my own behalf I desire to say that I heartily approve this bill, and that there are perhaps more men affected by this legislation residing in the second congressional district, than in any other in the United States; that I have studied the situation there thoroughly, and I feel convinced that the relief sought here is one that those people are entitled to. I particularly desire to have put in the record the editorial of the New York Evening Journal of April 6, 1916, which expresses my sentiments perhaps a great deal better than I can do it myself.

(The editorial referred to is as follows:)

AN OLD HORSE AND AN OLD MAN-A SELF-RESPECTING FARMER TAKES CARE OF THE OLD HORSE-THE RICHEST GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD TURNS THE OLD MAN OUT TO STARVE.

[Copyright, 1916, Star Co.]

At the top of this page are printed photographs of five men, each of whom has served the United States as a letter carrier for about 50 years. We print

their pictures, not to make any especial appeal on their behalf-for not one of them asks it.

The photographs are printed to show you what type of men give their lives to the Government and to the public-earnest, high class, self-respecting men, worthy of respect and of gratitude.

When a farmer has worked a horse for 20 years he gives that horse pasture for the rest of his life.

He does not turn the horse out on the roadside-the neighbors would not tolerate it.

When the Government of the United States has worked a man for 50 years, that Government, the richest in the world, ought not to turn that man out on the roadside, as our Government does.

There is now before the Congress at Washington a bill which begins as follows:

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That, beginning with the 1st day of July next following the passage of this act, the Postmaster General shall grant an indefinite leave of absence, together with an allowance of $600 per annum, to be payable monthly, to any person employed in the Railway Mail Service. the Rural Free Delivery Service, the City Free Delivery Service, and to postoffice clerks and other employees in post offices who are in the classified civil service who have become incapacitated from performing their duties through superannuation."

The nice long word " 'superannuation" means too old to work and earn a living.

This bill, if it passes, as it should pass, will permit the people of the country to give a pension of $600 a year to men who have worked faithfully for half a century.

Write to your Congressman and to the two Senators from your State and tell them that you want to see this bill made a law.

It is your money that will be spent to pension these faithful workers.
There is no charity, nothing but plain justice in a fair pension system.

And remember that in such a system there is no extravagance; on the contrary, there is economy.

When a man has worked a half century and can work no longer, he must still live.

Please believe that it is better for the country and cheaper for the Government and the taxpayers to give such a man a fair pension than to turn him adrift.

You can keep an old man in self-respect on a pension much more cheaply than the grafters will keep him in a poorhouse.

By treating old and faithful workers honestly and fairly you encourage the better class of young men to enter the Government service, and that service is your service.

Look at the faces on this page, a few of the men in one city who have served faithfully for so long.

Think of your own father as you look at these faces and use your influence with your Congressman to get justice for honest work.

P. S. This bill will come up in Washington to-morrow. If you act at all in the matter please act quickly. If you have not time to write a letter, tear off this page of the Evening Journal, write on it "These are my sentiments," and mail the page to your Congressman and to your Senators.

Mr. FULLER, M. C., of Illinois. I simply want to say that I have heard from a great many of the postal employees of my district, and I am heartily in favor of this bill, or at least of the principle em bodied in it. It seems to me that possibly the bill can be so shaped that it would not make any great expense to the Government, but would help for efficient service. I do not care to file any statement. You have more of those than you wish. I simply want to say that I hope you will make a favorable report upon the bill.

Mr. BORLAND, M. C., of Missouri. Mr. Chairman, I want to urge on the committee the very earnest consideration of this bill. I have been pretty closely associated with the postal employees, the postoffice clerks, the railway-mail clerks, the city carriers, and the rural

free delivery carriers from the time I entered Congress, seven years ago, and even before. The Government keeps those men up to a very high state of efficiency. It requires a pretty high standard of efficiency to enter the service, and the maintenance of that high standard of efficiency in the service not only from a business standpoint but from the moral standpoint of character. They have got to all be first-class men. Now, unfortunately, in all of these law-made salaries, it is said, and sometimes with a great deal of truth, that they do not keep pace with the ordinary advance of salaries in other positions, and when good times come on and the cost of living increases the man with a law-made salary has not any possible way to adjust himself to it. That is very largely true, and that is a question you gentlemen want to take into consideration with all of these men who are on statutory salaries. They feel the effect of the high cost of living, but they have no way of readjusting themselves to the conditions. A man who belongs to a carpenters' union has a way of adjusting himself to the high cost of living, but the man with a law-made salary does not.

Now, in addition to that, as has been said just a moment ago, these men enter this business, and to most of them it is a life profession. They must become proficient in it, and the very fact of that efficiency precludes them from stopping at some point and entering another business. In fact, it is not to the interest of Uncle Sam that he should drive good men out of the service and compel them to seek opportunities elsewhere. They ought to understand that if they give their lives to this business they have something at the end of that period of faithful service. Of course, if they are separated from the service through their own fault, they lose that, but here is a class of men who are in the service for a good record and remain in the service. Now, if Uncle Sam were to drive those men out to seek better opportunities elsewhere, it would not be an economic business advantage for the Government, and the same is true, I think, from the standpoint of superannuation. When a man's abilities begin to decrease, as they must and will with all of us, it is not easy to confine the line to where he ought to be separated from the service and thrown entirely out, and frequently I suppose it might be true that men are continued along in the service when, as a matter of fact, it would be cheaper and more businesslike if they were retired and younger and more vigorous men put in their places. Those are the economic features, from the purely cold-blooded business proposition, and it is a business proposition for Uncle Sam to go at; that is, from that standpoint, and I think that it can be urged upon you very successfully, that from the standpoint of justice to the man and from the standpoint of commanding their loyalty and their interest in their work and their continued efficiency, it is going to help materially in the service. I think it is a question of justice to them-the men who have served a long lifetime and done it well and have kept up their standard of efficiency to the point that Uncle Sam requires them-to see something ahead of themselves and their families in their old age, and that is the reason I want to urge the very favorable consideration of this bill.

The CHAIRMAN. Are you familiar with the Tague bill, that has the same purpose as this?

Mr. BORLAND. No; I am not.

STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD WAYNE PARKER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY.

Mr. PARKER. Mr. Chairman, I have a statement, but I would rather speak than read. I do not want to trouble the subcommittee with petitions, because I do not think petitions are what we want to decide as to whether this is just or right. I am convinced that this is a real need in the service, and that the letters that I have received from Newark, Orange, and East Orange, N. J., express a unanimous demand for some provision to meet a crying need. I have always been a believer in some system of civil-service retirement, on the ground that it would tend to good service; not only because good men would stay and because they would stay at a smaller salary and be willing to do so, but also because it is now impossible to take a man that is sick, or that is old, and turn him out. Kindness will not permit it, and yet it is an injustice to the Government to keep in a man who can not do his work. Although there are fair objections made to any system of retirement on the ground that you are turning men into children by any such system, the advantages have been so great that even the great railroads and private concerns have in very many cases adopted such a system as being essential to their work, and, if so, it can certainly be adopted here. I am free to confess that the broader bills for retirement that I have seen have not satisfied me. Such a system must be based upon various considerations. One plan is to consider the length of service and pay a man who retires his pension, or a commuted amount, by way of deferred pay. The second principle is one of insurance, by which a man who falls ill or if he dies his family gets something, very much as the brokers on the stock exchange in New York all contribute $10, and when a man dies they give $10,000 to his widow free of debts. These are two different principles.

The adjustment of these matters in the. various branches of the service, which differ so much between a clerk in the department here and a man who is breaking his health by toil, working in the Railway Mail Service, such as not one of us could do, or walking the streets day after day until he gets old as a carrier-the differences are so great that I am free to confess that I could not very well myself frame a general bill which would in all respects commend itself to the people as tending to the good of the country.

This measure belongs only to the Postal Service, which I think is different enough from the other services to enable it to be considered. This covers only superannuation, the case where a man, by 20 or 30 years service-if he went in below 40, he would be at least 65 or probably 70 before he will take it-by 20 years service has earned it. It is needed in a great many post offices where old carriers can not walk any more. Whether the amount is exactly right, I do not know. The committee must consider what amount is such a proportion of his salary as will not tempt a man to go out to get it and at the same time be sufficient to repay them for the work they have done. Six hundred dollars is, I suppose, about 50 per cent of the last pay of the most of these men, certainly of the carriers, and it may be of the last of some of the other pays. It is a sort of general average, just as we give for old age in pensions for the Army, some $20 a month for service that was done 40 years before, and in the Regular

Army we now give them up to $40 a month-I have forgotten now what it is

Mr. KAHN of California. $67.

Mr. PARKER. That is for men who have served 30 years. Mr. Kahn, who has spoken to you can tell you much more about what is done in the Army.

The general system is not before you gentlemen. You are taking up one single branch, that of long, continued, faithful service, where the man, by reason of age, ought to be taken care of, not only as a duty to him, but as a duty to the Government itself. Whether a man who dies ought to have a commuted sum paid to his family, is another question. We are not making pensioners all the way through, but it is an absolute demand that comes from those who have done the work, and every private employer would devise the same scheme to take care of his employees. It is a case of "well done, good and faithful servant;" that is what it is.

STATEMENT OF HON. SAMUEL H. MILLER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA.

Mr. MILLER. I realize the fact that there are a number of gentlemen here who want to register themselves in favor of this bill, and I am here for the purpose of saying that I hope that the committee will approve this bill and report it to the House, and that it will pass. I speak particularly for the rural carriers that I am more intimately acquainted with, and I know of my own observation that they are the hardest worked men and the poorest paid men in the service. The Post Office Department is the only department that pays its own way and it can afford to do what we propose to do in this bill, and I am sure the people will ratify it. I thank you for hearing me.

STATEMENT OF HON. MURRAY HULBERT, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

Mr. HULBERT. Mr. Chairman, of the two hundred and odd million dollars collected by the Federal Government under the tariff, $150,000,000 approximately was received at the port of New York. Of the four hundred and odd million dollars of the internal revenue collected during the past year more than $75,000,000 was collected in the city of New York. Of the $80,000,000 collected under the income-tax law, nearly $30,000,000 was collected at the city of New York. Now, I cite these figures merely to show you the great volume of business which is done in the city, in which the post-office employee performs such an important part. In the post office of New York City last year the receipts amounted to $30,127,062.01, while the expenditures were about $10,915,212.99, leaving a profit in the New York City post office to the Federal Government of approximately $20,000,000. If it be true that this profit was practically exhausted by its application to those post offices throughout the country where there were deficits, it is to be noted that the letter carriers and postal clerks in the city of New York bore the brunt of bringing to the Government's revenue just the amount of money which enabled the department to practically break even.