Note 4 — THE ARENA FOR SEPTEMBER.

Postmaster-General Cave Johnson said: “Experience teaches that if individual enterprise is allowed to perform such portions of the business of the Government as it may find for its advantage, the Government will soon be left to perform unprofitable portions of it only, and must be driven to abandon it entirely or carry it on at a heavy tax upon the public Treasury…. I may further add that the Department created under the Constitution and designed to exercise exclusive power for the transmission of intelligence, must necessarily be superseded in much of its most important business if the telegraph be permitted to remain under the control of individuals” (Reps. of 1845 and 1846).