The Postoffice Department is a large institution and does a big business--a huge business which has much detail and extends over a vast territory. To handle such a business properly, necessarily requires the service of a large force of operatives. Most of the work of the department is of that sort which human brain and muscle alone can do. The machine can touch but a few of the minor details of the vast amount of work our Postoffice Department handles. It may cancel stamps, perforate documents, etc., but it cannot collect, sort, distribute, carry and deliver mail. It requires human muscle and brains to do such work. Much of it requires skill--the trained eye and hand as well as academic knowledge. Well, the Postoffice Department employs a large force--a vast army of men, and some women, I believe. Counting the employes in its legal, purchasing and inspection divisions with the postmasters, assistant postmasters, railway and office clerks, city and rural carriers, messengers, etc., there must be somewhere around 330,000 people employed in our federal postal service. Whether that is too large or too small a force for the _proper_ handling of our postal service is beyond my purpose here to discuss. That the business now handled by the department could be far better handled by 330,000 employes than it now is, and that such a service force could, if properly directed and disciplined, handle a business much larger than that now transacted by the department, I do not hesitate to assert. I base that assertion chiefly on the following observed conditions: First: There are frills and innovations in handling the business which take up the time of employes and which have little or no service value. Second: There is, not too much “politics,” as Mr. Hitchcock and his immediate predecessors have modestly but wrongfully called it, but too much political partisanship--_dirty, grafting, thieving, partisanship_--not only in the appointment of people to the service, but also in making partisan, often grafting, crooked use of them after appointment. Third: There are too many non-producers--non-service producers--among that army of 330,000. It is the last, or third, condition named that I shall here briefly consider, or such observed phases of it as, in my judgment, so trench into the postal revenues as not only amounts to a raid in itself, but which also encourages others to graft and loot. First, I desire to say that there are many thousands in that postal service, many who are honest, faithful and _competent_ workers. There are about seventy thousand (69,712 according to the department’s report for 1910) carriers, city and rural, most of whom work industriously and efficiently and who are underpaid for the service they render.