Why do not our postal officials and commissions reach out to Cornville and summon a few eighth-grade nubbins? Then turn over to them the _wastefully_ collected and collated statistics, data and _talk_ which the Postoffice Department has in cold storage and tell them to “go to it” at, say, $25 per week? Yes, why not? Skilled lawyers, reputed “experts,” men of “experience” and “students,” it would seem, have told all they know about this railway mail cost problem--told the truth or equivocated or _lied_ about it, to the best of their ability and in full accord and harmony with their several “standards” of veracity. Still they have failed to uncover or to _divulge_ the essential and governing factors in the problem--failed for _thirty or forty years_. Is it not about time, then, for sensible people, I would ask, to enter the plea of the Master and say, “Suffer little children to come unto me?” Any _average_ “shock” of eighth-grade nubbins from Cornville, or from other hamlets where the “little red school house” has been in fairly active operation, will “figger” the cost--_the cost to the railroads_--of mail haulage and handling, in not to exceed _four weeks_. That is, such a bunch of eighth graders will arrive at a dependable solution of this forty-year-old problem in four weeks, if they are given the _plain, bald facts upon which a correct solution depends_, and not turned loose on a lot of befuddling, alleged data and _accepted_ “testimony.” As I must necessarily touch upon the _raid_ of the railroads into postal revenues when I reach the closing division of this volume, I shall not comment further here on the testimony and special pleadings presented by railroad representatives to the several postal commissions that have sat and sat and then “reported.” The commissions probably--_possibly_, if not probably--reported the best they could on the evidence presented to them. Certain it is, their reports present much valuable--much informative--data of which neither Congress nor the Postoffice Department appears to have made any constructive or corrective use. Before quitting this railway pay raid, however, it may be well to do a little figuring--basing our figures on Mr. Kirkman’s tabulations of rates, printed some pages back. The tables of rates are correct. They ought to be. If rate-tables could vote the youngest of the two was entitled to the suffrage many years since.[15] But let us look into and over them in a little-red-school-house way.