I intended to write further here about this raid of the express companies on postal revenues, but have concluded to defer much of what I intended to say in handling this phase of our general subject to the closing division of this volume--the parcels post. One reason for doing so is that today it is _not_ the express companies which command and direct the raidings that _express business_ is making, and for some years has made, into what rightly and _legally_ should be the field of postal revenue gathering. Twenty years ago, a trifle more or less, when John Wanamaker was Postmaster General, he stated to a committee or delegation calling on him, that there were four insuperable objections to the establishment of a parcels post at that time. He named the four objections. They were, if I remember rightly, “The Adams Express Company, the American Express Company, the Wells-Fargo Express Company and the United States Express Company.” It may be he named the Southern or some other express company instead of the United States Express Company. I cannot remember. At any rate he named _four_ express companies as the “insuperable objections” to the establishment of a parcels post. Well, he was right for the period in which he spoke. But twenty years is a long time in a swift, governmentally aided get-rich-quick age or country like ours. There are some dozen or more express companies now--a dozen or more _on paper_--_quasi_-express companies. The railroad companies and railroad officials _control the express companies and the express business of this country today_. A departmental report of the government showed, as stated in the Saturday Evening Post of May 27, 1911, “that the four principal express companies have thirty-seven directors, of whom _thirty-two_ are residents of New York, _two_ are residents of Chicago and _three_ of San Francisco. _These express directors are also directors in twenty-five of the leading railroad systems of the United States._” So, today, if Mr. Wanamaker were inclined to do so, he would probably revise his statement of twenty or more years ago. He would probably say that the _railroads of this country_ stood as the insuperable objection or obstruction to the establishment and operation of an efficient, cheap and serviceable parcels post--the failure or neglect to do which is running one of the greatest raids into postal revenues this or any other nation has ever known. Mr. Albert W. Atwood in writing to this point under the general caption “The Great Express Companies,” in the American Magazine, February, 1911, issue, says: