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.
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