Total, according to the Postmaster-General's method of apportioning costs between passenger and freight traffic $3,878,431.75 [Footnote C: There may be some duplication in this item, but to eliminate it would require an elaborate computation which, in view of the broad margin of expenses over receipts, is wholly superfluous. Whatever duplication exists must be small in comparison with this margin.] Thus even the Postmaster-General's method of apportioning costs between freight and passenger traffic produces an operating cost in excess of the total pay received by the railways, leaving nothing whatever for return upon the fair value of the property or necessary but non-income producing improvements. There is no allowance, in any of these estimates of cost, for the large volume of free transportation supplied to officers and agents of the Post Office Department, when not in charge of mail, although this amounts to over 50,000,000 passenger miles annually and, at the low average rate of two cents per mile, would cost the Post Office Department more than $1,000,000 per year. Moreover, as will presently be shown (pages 13-14) all the figures here discussed are for the month of November, a month which, because of the abnormally low ratio of passenger traffic to freight traffic, substantially understates the cost of the passenger train services, when figures derived from it are applied to an entire year. It thus becomes evident that any inquiry which takes into consideration the necessary elements of the situation will demonstrate that railway mail pay is too low. It is only by ignoring essential elements of the service and of expense and the fundamental element of a return on the value of the property that any argument to the contrary can be constructed. Thus the mail traffic does not pay its operating cost. That traffic is a substantial percentage of the total public service performed by the railroads. It should contribute a substantial proportion to the taxes which the railroads have to pay and to the return on railroad property which its owners are entitled to receive. Clearly no fair method can be devised which will fail to show that the existing mail pay is far below a fairly compensatory basis. Certainly this condition ought not to be intensified by adding the injustice of still further reductions. On the contrary, the unjust reductions of recent years should be corrected for the future, and the railroads should be relieved from the strikingly unjust methods by which they are at present deprived of anything approaching fair compensation. V. THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL'S APPORTIONMENT OF SPACE BETWEEN THE MAIL SERVICE AND THE OTHER SERVICES RENDERED ON PASSENGER TRAINS DID NOT ALLOW TO THE MAILS THE SPACE WHICH THEY ACTUALLY REQUIRE AND USE AND THIS HAD THE RESULT OF UNDULY REDUCING HIS ESTIMATES OF THE COST TO THE RAILWAYS OF THE MAIL SERVICE.