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

The Parcel Post is managed differently in France from this country. The service is carried on under the control of the Post Office by railway and steamship companies. Parcels are not accepted at post offices except in places distant from railway stations, and in Paris and important towns they are taken in at special parcel booking offices. Neither are parcels delivered by the Post Office but by the railway companies. Then in France there is a postal service called “Valeurs à recouvrer.” Everybody is allowed to deposit bills at a post office for collection. This is a great convenience and very practical. You enclose the bill, or the invoice or draft which you want to be paid, in a special envelope called “Enveloppe de valuer à recouvrer,” and you hand it to an officer of the Post Office. A certificate of the posting must be obtained. When the bill or invoice has been paid by the addressee, the Department sends you a money order which can be cashed at any post office. The French Post Office also supplies card money orders payable not at a post office, but at the payee's address. The Spanish Post Office is trying. Spain is a thinly populated country, with comparatively few large towns, and if you travel off the beaten track you will meet all kinds of inconveniences. A Spanish post office is usually superior to so petty a trade as the sale of stamps: you obtain these at the shops. Moreover, though other postal business is transacted at the Post Office, there are certain hours set apart for different kinds of business. A Spanish post office may be open from nine until ten for the registration of letters, from ten until eleven for the sale of postal orders, from eleven until noon for the payment of postal orders, and so on. This is the Spaniard's idea of simplifying business, not only for the public, but the official. The Spanish postal official is often a poorly paid and rather badly used individual. The postmaster of a large town in the Canary Islands confessed to a friend of mine, who was postmaster of a big city in the United Kingdom, that his salary was less than a third of the Englishman's. And he added, “I don't even get that as a rule unless I go to Madrid for it.”