Robert C. Schenck to Mr. Weaver, June 30, 1873

General Schenck to Mr. Weaver.

Sir: I have received your note of the 27th instant, referring to an official letter of mine of the 30th of April last, addressed to the Secretary of State of the United States, relating to the charges made for the transmission of messages by the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, a copy of which letter has appeared in the public prints.

You appear to overlook or misunderstand entirely the point of my communication on the subject, and its object.

I raised no question as to the tariff of prices of your company, whether excessive or moderate, for sending dispatches by the cable across the ocean from England to America. My purpose was to attract attention to the charges, made, as I understand, under some arrangement between your company and the Western Union Company, for the use of the land-lines of that company within the United States, to reach points west and south of New York; and I showed that the exaction of payments made here for that portion of telegraphic service was double, or more than double as much as the rates indicated in the tariff of the American company, for the same service, over the same lines at home. This yon have not denied. I brought this matter to the notice of my Government, as it was proper I should do.

If I am not mistaken as to the fact, there is no reason for your characterizing my report as containing “unwarranted strictures.”

Whether, as you state, the Government of the United States “has only paid half the current rates of the company for some years past,” and whether that was, as you also inform me, “a concession made as a pure matter of courtesy,” I do not certainly know. I found your scale of charges when I came here to represent the United States about the same, I believe, as it continues to be. Inquiry being made since receiving your letter, I learn that the reduced rates, of which you speak, relate to some agreement not to make double charges against either the United States Government or Her Majesty’s government for dispatches of which any portion may happen to be transmitted in cipher. But whatever may be the case in respect of that statement, I do not see how, with justice or propriety, it should be taken as a consideration for not exposing what appears to be a wrong, in the correction of which I have shown that the public and private persons are equally concerned.

I had far other and higher motives for my action, than to assail the interests of any of the telegraph companies on either side of the Atlantic; and my communication to my Government having been made public, it is certainly no “ill requital” for any favor or advantage that you may be supposed to have conferred, to afford you an opportunity for abolishing an unjust discrimination against many of those who have to correspond through the medium of the telegraph.

I am, &c.,