Q. What is the average charge on your road for freight per ton mile?--A. Last year ninety-nine one-hundredths of a cent per ton mile. Q. You do not know how much it costs? That is correct, is it not? You do not know how much it costs?--A. _That is correct._ Q. You do not know how much it costs to operate a 40 or 60 foot mail car?--A. _No, sir; only approximately._ Q. Can you say, approximately, how much?--A. _No, sir. It will afford me great pleasure to give you all this information that can be determined if you desire, but it is valueless in itself._ Q. Can you say approximately?--A. _I can not._ I would be very glad to furnish you all the figures, but such questions, _like the cost of the velocity_ with which we send trains across the country, _are unknown_. Q. Does it cost a dollar a mile as the outside?--A. I could not---- Q. Would it not?--A. _I would not want to pay you the disrespect of saying a thing that I know nothing about._ The foregoing testimony appears on pages 213-216 of the Wolcott report. The italics are mine. When so well informed a railroad man as Mr. Kirkman answers questions--questions covering that which appears, to a layman at least, to be essential in successful railway management--as he is reported in the foregoing, what is to be thought of such testimony? With all due respect to Mr. Kirkman, it may be said that his apparently frank confession of ignorance as to several points made subject of inquiry by the commissioners in the part of his testimony quoted, many readers of it are left with more or less valid grounds for doubt--grounds for asking more or less offensive questions: “Was the witness telling the truth or equivocating--stalling for time?” If he told the truth--if his acknowledged ignorance was genuine--as to several essential factors in the successful management and financing of a railroad--then of what value are his--or any other railroad man’s--statistics and tabulations of cost, profits, losses, rates, tariffs, “cost of velocity,” etc., etc.? Mr. Kirkman’s reputation for truth and veracity, I believe, is as high as that of any other railroad man’s in the country, yet on several basic factors in the problem which the Wolcott Commission was, presumably at least, trying to solve, he confessed an ignorance as profound as its members and the officials of the Postoffice Department acknowledge. If, as Mr. Kirkman virtually testifies, the information sought is beyond the ken of man, then why persist in spending thousands--_yes millions_--of money trying to run it down? If these railroad men do _not_ know the things which it is _necessary to know_ to arrive at a solution of this railway mail carrying problem--to arrive at a just, equitable rate of pay for the service rendered--why waste more time on them? That question brings us back to the _rails_ again.