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

There is a type of English traveller who habitually regards the foreigner as a person incapable of the higher civilisation to be found in the British Isles. We can have no sympathy with him, and the British Post Office has learnt much and is learning much from the Post Offices of other countries. The German Post Office is, for instance, one of the best-organised systems in the world. The German people owe this state of things largely to the ability and energy of Dr. Von Stephan, who was mainly instrumental in establishing the Postal Union. The post offices of the German Empire are among the finest modern buildings in Europe. Many were built under the direction of Dr. Von Stephan, and they are an example to the British Post Office of how such buildings should be erected. It was a fixed principle with Dr. Von Stephan, that when any special type of architecture distinguished any particular town the architecture of the post office should faithfully reflect it. As a consequence the offices which have been erected since 1870 reveal great diversities of style, and are in striking contrast to the monotony characteristic of our English post offices. We may be quite sure that the German Postmaster-General would never have sanctioned the erection in a quaint old English town, full of Tudor and Jacobean architecture, of a “standard post office.” Yet this enormity is constantly being perpetrated in some of our old English towns and villages, and the consequence is that the beauty and picturesqueness of the place are seriously damaged. The post office swears at the rest of the buildings, and if the buildings had only a voice I am quite sure they would swear at the post office.