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

The Post Office messenger certainly receives an excellent training in good habits, and the discipline he undergoes is excellent for him. He is required to be alert and resourceful, though perhaps he does not have the same opportunities for varied experience as the district messenger boy. No doubt his training is useful also for outside employment if he leaves the Service at the end of his time, but the boys' special qualifications are for Post Office service. The boy messenger is especially interesting as a human type. He comes into a public office raw and untrained, and he usually leaves it a well-disciplined and decent-mannered man. If it unfortunately happens that discarded boy messengers frequently join the ranks of the unemployed, or even of the unemployable, it is difficult to believe that they can ever become hooligans. How is the boy licked into shape? First of all, in any large body of men or boys there is a recognised standard of conduct; even the boy who lives in the street is conscious of a standard of the street; but of course in a public office the standard is maintained also by rules and regulations. Perhaps we shall know these boys better, and besides obtain little glimpses into their lives, if I let them tell their own stories, by means of our old friend the written explanation. The special feature of the boys' explanations is that there is nothing studied about their composition. As a rule, they are simple, direct, and unlaboured. They dispense with such trifles as punctuation, orthography, or syntax, but you feel when you are reading the documents that the boy is stating the facts as he knows them. It has been said that “it is better not to know too much than to know the things that ain't so,” and we forgive the form of this sentence because of the way it grips with the situation: it closes with the truth; there is nothing to be said in opposition to it, but its form is the form of the half-educated. So it is with the literary efforts of the boy messenger: they are fresh, human, and free from artifice. “Are you free from any bodily injury or defect?” was asked of a youthful applicant for a boy messengership. And he wrote down proudly, “Yes; I am in fine condition.”