As I refer later to some of the practices indulged in the weighing periods, I will here mention only a method used for years prior to the issuance of that order in March, 1907--a method of arriving at the “average daily weight” for the carriage of which the railroad was to be paid for a period of four years. That method was, though I have been unable to learn that it was ever officially authorized by the Postoffice Department, to find the daily average for each week covered in the weighing period and then arrive at the average for the whole period by dividing the sum of the weekly averages by the number of weeks in which the mail was weighed. Nothing wrong with that is there? Should work out fair and square, should it not? Well, it did not. The method was all right in theory and in letter, but a crooked practice was worked into its application--worked into it by collusion between crooked railway and public officials. And the crookedness of the practice was very plain and bold and bald. It was what in street parlance would be called “raw.” Here it is in figures: Take a “heavy” mail line. Say the total mail weight for a week was, using a round figure, 840,000 pounds or 420 tons. Now dividing that total by 7, the number of days in a week and the number of days also on which the mail was weighed, would give a daily _average_ of 120,000 pounds, or 60 tons. That is all clear and straight, is it not? Most certainly it is. But the crooked application of the method divided the week’s total by 6 instead of by 7--divided the total of seven days’ weights by six. The railway people, you see, were great respecters of the Sabbath. They would run trains on Sunday to accommodate the public and to meet the necessities of their business, which was, and is, perfectly proper. They would also carry the mails for your Uncle Sam, which was also right and proper. But their lofty respect for the Holy Sabbath, or the high esteem in which they held our much loved and much abused Uncle, was such as induced them to hold up said Uncle as a respecter of the Sabbath, or seventh day, while they “held him up” in averaging his mail weights. In the illustrative example we have put on the slate, the “hold up” would amount to--let’s see: 840,000 pounds, or 420 tons, divided by 6 gives us 70 tons as the daily average for the week, instead of 60 tons, as the actual average was. That is a “hold up” for pay for ten tons a day--for 10 tons not carried. “What did the hold-up amount to in cash?” Yes, it might be well to follow our hypothetical or illustrative example to its _cash_ terminal. Well, that is easily and quickly done. The rate of pay per ton mile per year on daily weights above 2½ tons is $21.37.[16] That ten tons added to the daily average would give to the railroads, then, just $213.70 in _unearned_ cash each day.