The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

Communications of this nature may have brought about the change in name, but I am inclined to think that this was induced by the reluctance of the staff to admit the deadness of any postal packet which passed through their hands. At one time there were Dead Letter Offices only in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, but now the chief towns in the Kingdom have their own Returned Letter Offices, and they deal with the business in their own districts. Our first thought will probably be that the work of these offices must be of a somewhat simple character, but this idea will not survive many minutes' consideration. A large proportion of the letters are found to contain enclosures of varying value which require special treatment. Among them are bank notes, cheques, bills of exchange, letters of credit, circular notes, dividend warrants, money and postal orders, stamps, jewellery, and countless articles of value. All these different items have to be accounted for, and care taken that none but the rightful owners shall possess them. The figures relating to these undelivered postal packets are positively startling. They show an amount of carelessness on the part of the British public which in these days of universal education is almost unexplainable. During the year ending March 1910 the total number of undelivered packets of all kinds, including packets entirely unaddressed and articles found loose, is estimated to have reached a total of 31,241,000. The curious thing about these figures is that they include nearly 400,000 packets containing articles of value. The total amount of money found in addressed and unaddressed packets was £647,832, of which £15,127 was in cash and bank notes and £632,705 in bills, cheques, money orders, postal orders, and postage stamps. These figures, of course, do not include the value of remittances which may have been enclosed in packets returned unopened to the senders or the value of miscellaneous property dealt with as undeliverable.