"Out of 27,000 stations supplied by messenger service 7,000 are paid for by the Department at a cost of between $1,000,000 and $1,100,000 per annum, leaving the other 20,000 stations to be supplied by and at the expense of the railroads." Investigation has shown that on mail routes, where the average mail pay of the railroad company is $900 a year, the average cost of this mail messenger service is $400, calculating only $100 as the expense for each station where they are required to perform the service. There are instances where the company pays in cash each year, for delivering the mails between station and post office, considerably more than the Government pays for the entire mail service over its line of road. There is no such feature in the express service. WHY DO RAILROADS CARRY THE MAILS WITHOUT PROFIT? The question is sometimes asked why the railroads continue to carry the mails if there is no profit in the business. Carrying the mails is not the only traffic which railroads take upon terms that would bankrupt them if applied to all their business. There is no profit in running passenger trains on most railroads; that is, the receipts from all the traffic carried on passenger trains are not sufficient to pay a train mileage or car mileage share of operating expenses and taxes and charges for the use of capital. But a large part of this cost of conducting the business of a railroad, such as taxes, interest, maintenance of roadway, general office expenses, and many others, would continue substantially the same if the passenger trains were discontinued. Having the railroad, and its taxes, and interest, and maintenance expenses to meet, anyhow, no railroad can afford to refuse any income from passenger trains that amounts to more than their train operating cost. On the same principle they accept low rates per mile as a share of through passenger fares which, if applied to all passenger fares, would show a loss. The road is there, the trains are running, and the cars only partially loaded; the addition of through passengers may not materially increase the expense, and the road is better off to accept the business at less than the average cost, rather than to reject it. But whatever the passenger trains lose must be made up by the freight trains if the road is to continue in business. The constant aim of the managers of the railroad is to secure from each class of traffic not only the operating cost peculiar to that traffic, but a proportion of the general cost; but business is not necessarily rejected on which it is impossible to secure such proportion. Many of the reasons which impel them to run passenger trains without profit apply to their acceptance of the Government mails. They facilitate the freight business; it is better to carry them at a loss than not to carry them at all.