Having in mind, from my youth in the Northwest, the story of the land-grant railroads, I had begun a search for a factual basis with which to support the air-power theme. I knew that, following the Civil War, the whole force of the United States government had been placed behind the expansion of the railroads as a means of opening up the great West, providing jobs for discharged war veterans, and developing a vast area of rich territory. To encourage this expansion the government had given some 180,000,000 acres of undeveloped land to certain roads and in return had passed legislation requiring the railroads to rebate to the government a percentage of the charge for hauling government freight and passengers. The balance sheet on this project, if one could be found, might prove interesting to the air-transport situation. Inquiry among railroad operators disclosed no record of the transaction and little interest in it, but research in the government records produced the surprising information that the roads had repaid their debt to the government however one might figure the original land values. If the figure selected was $1.00 per acre, the estimate at the time of the gift, the roads, having at the time of inquiry rebated some $640,000,000, had paid the debt back threefold. If the figure selected was $3.00 per acre, a fair average of the selling price the roads had received for the land, then they had still broken even. In other words, the government had not subsidized the roads with this grant; it had made instead a profitable investment. A short while after this inquiry was made, Congress revoked the land-grant rebates. Similar inquiry into the air-mail situation now revealed an even more startling figure. At the time of the inquiry, the airlines were still making money. Having lost half of their equipment to the military air-transport services, and having supplied a large part of the operating leadership, they had stepped up their utilization of equipment, and reduced their costs, to the point where they were earning satisfactory profits from mail and passengers without yet having exploited the possibilities of air cargo. Had they been “reasonably regulated” as required by law, they might have continued their record instead of running into serious losses as they have since done. But at the moment of the inquiry, the Post Office Department could make the proud boast that receipts by the government from the sale of air-mail stamps alone had already exceeded payments made to the operators for carrying the mails, even after a heavy loading of Post Office Department overhead. The United States government was not subsidizing the airlines with mail pay; it was taking a nice profit from that operation. Post Office subsidies were granted for several different classes of mail by palpably low rates but the special air-mail stamp carried its own freight.