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

The Department always holds large stocks of cloths, linings, tapes, braids, and buttons, and it issues them from time to time to its tailoring contractors. Think of a supply of three or four million buttons! The percentage of misfits is two. Mail bags, parcel post receptacles, official bicycles, and telegraph instruments are supplied in large quantities. Over 11,000 bicycles, carriers, and trailers are in use throughout the Kingdom, and the mileage covered by them amounts to 150 million miles per year. Miscellaneous postal stores, such as stamps, seals, scales, weights, telegraph paper, string, sealing-wax, are purchased by the Stores for the Post Office. Printed matter, pens, ink, paper, and office requisites, though stocked and distributed by the Stores, are supplied by the Stationery Office, Whitehall. Household stores, that is materials for cleansing and cooking purposes, are supplied to the Post Office by the Board of Works. The Stores supply the General Post Office with red tape to the extent of 1,000,000 yards annually. The amount will not come as a surprise to many people, who may perhaps be inclined to say that the exports of red tape by the Post Office even exceeds the big import. Needless to say, the Stores only supply the article in its material form: they are content to allow the administrative branches to manufacture the other kind. Pencils are supplied to the tune of 1,000,000, and pens I have already mentioned. Again the critic may step in and say that if the average post office pen were renewed as often as it ought to be the order from the Stores would be still larger than it is. The stationery supplies are of course stupendous. Here are a few figures covering one year: 2200 gallons of gum, 4800 gallons of writing ink, 11,000 boxes of paper-fasteners, 4800 quires of blotting-paper. And you can get sealing wax in three qualities, and in hundredweights. But if I continue in this strain I shall turn the heads of my readers.