Many and many a year ago a stupid Post-Office Department adopted the policy of paying subsidies to certain railroads for the carriage of mails which they had already contracted to carry. It is doubtful whether a single dollar of this money was well spent. To secure the ridiculously high prices which the government pays for the carriage of the mail, the railroads could always have been induced to contract for as speedy a delivery as was possible. Subsidies could not make them do more. Even a stupid P. O. Department woke up to this fact, at last, and quit paying the subsidies. Mails were carried just as fast after that as before. The rate of payment is so high—the plum so very luscious—that the corporation could not refuse the contracts, _especially when they could borrow a rascally congressman’s frank, stuff the bags with bogus mail, and thus secure a false average of weight upon which they were paid for the whole year_. (Congressman Livingston of Georgia can tell you how this is done.) But the Southern Railroad clung to the subsidy. _It needed the money_, as Meredith of Virginia once plaintively stated in the House. The P. O. Department no longer asked it or advised it—but certain congressmen from the South who are ravenously fond of free passes stood by the hungry corporation, and at every session of Congress this subsidy is voted. The false pretense, used as an excuse, is that it secures _fast mail for the South_. There is no truth in the statement. Under an ordinary contract for mail carriage, the government can secure precisely the same service as the railroad gives in return for the subsidy. In other words, the $142,000 is _a gift to the Wall Street Monarch, J. P. Morgan_. Hon. James H. Blount of Georgia was for many years Chairman of the Committee on Post-Offices and Post Roads. He understood every detail of that service. He bitterly opposed this subsidy. I myself heard him denounce it in the most wrathful manner; and he declared on the floor of the House that the people got nothing whatever for it. It was a donation—nothing more. Blount’s place in Congress is now partially filled by a different kind of man—and the indignant protest of the South against the contemplated steal was not voiced by him or by any other member from Georgia. That honor was won by Tennessee. When Hon. John A. Moon and John Wesley Gaines denounced this subsidy as it deserved, they earned the applause and the grateful remembrance of every honest man in the South. The Hon. R. B. Macon of Arkansas also deserves the highest credit for his opposition to the theft. Of course, “Slippery Jim” Richardson of Tennessee rushed to the relief of the corporation, _as “Slippery Jim” always does_, and the robbers, led by the Bedstead statesman of Alabama, prevailed.