The Mail Trains Are Not Bound To
Wait; And Thus, In The Large Cities, Far Distant From New York,
Great Irregularity Prevails.
It is I think owing to this - at any
rate partly to this - that the system of telegraphing has become so
prevalent.
It is natural that this should be so between towns which
are in the due course of post perhaps forty-eight hours asunder; but
the uncertainty of the post increases the habit, to the profit of
course of the companies which own the wires, but to the manifest
loss of the post-office.
But the deficiency which struck me most forcibly in the American
post-office, was the absence of any recognized official delivery of
letters. The United States post-office does not assume to itself
the duty of taking letters to the houses of those for whom they are
intended, but holds itself as having completed the work for which
the original postage has been paid, when it has brought them to the
window of the post-office of the town to which they are addressed.
It is true that in most large towns - though by no means in all - a
separate arrangement is made by which a delivery is afforded to
those who are willing to pay a further sum for that further service;
but the recognized official mode of delivery is from the office
window. The merchants and persons in trade have boxes at the
windows, for which they pay. Other old-established inhabitants in
town, and persons in receipt of a considerable correspondence,
receive their letters by the subsidiary carriers and pay for them
separately. But the poorer classes of the community, those persons
among which it is of such paramount importance to increase the
blessing of letter writing, obtain their letters from the post-
office windows.
In each of these cases the practice acts to the prejudice of the
department. In order to escape the tax on delivery, which varies
from two cents to one cent a letter, all men in trade, and many who
are not in trade, hold office boxes; consequently immense space is
required. The space given at Chicago, both to the public without
and to the official within, for such delivery, is more than four
times that required at Liverpool for the same purpose. But
Liverpool is three times the size of Chicago. The corps of clerks
required for the window delivery is very great, and the whole affair
is cumbrous in the extreme. The letters at most offices are given
out through little windows, to which the inquirer is obliged to
stoop. There he finds himself opposite to a pane of glass with a
little hole, and when the clerk within shakes his head at him, he
rarely believes but what his letters are there if he could only
reach them. But in the second case, the tax on the delivery, which
is intended simply to pay the wages of the men who take them out, is
paid with a bad grace; it robs the letter of its charm, and forces
it to present itself in the guise of a burden:
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