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

Instead of being treated as a joke, as a similar order might have been in this country, numerous letters were at once received by the United States Post Office from postmasters and school-boards all over the country indicating the liveliest interest in the subject. This is a chance for a British Postmaster-General to save his successors much unnecessary and trying correspondence, by adopting a similar policy. The rural delivery of letters in the United States was during many recent years in a very backward state, but considerable advances have lately taken place. The fetching of letters from the post office was the practice in places with even a large population. A writer in the Paris Messenger not long ago was very indignant at the claims made by an official of the American Government, “that the American postal system was the best in the world and the best managed.” The writer said he had made an examination of European postal systems recently, and this was about as impudent a pronouncement as can well be imagined. America possesses no Postal Savings Bank, no Postal Telegraph system (in many Western States it costs three francs to send a dozen words a hundred miles over the monopolist private wires), there is no system of Parcel Post such as exists in England, and until recently there was no rural delivery. To see a long line of citizens, even in towns of five and six thousand inhabitants, waiting outside the post office for their morning mail, was as curious a sight for a European as could be imagined. I should add that the writer was an American.