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

Whenever we speak of the activities of London we have to deal with big figures, and comparative tables of growth and development are a little wearisome to the modern reader, simply because they have lost all the charm of unexpectedness. We know there must be a huge staff employed at the Head Office in London; the statement that 20,000 is the actual number leaves us unaffected: perhaps even we guessed it was 40,000. We are fully prepared to hear that billions of letters are delivered in the City of London weekly; we are even a little disappointed when we know that up to the present the average is about 5½ millions. If we have been interested in the new building itself and what it is expected to bear in the way of work, we may at least like to know that the total weight of the weekly correspondence passing through its walls is about 366 tons. I expect that if we were asked in a newspaper competition to state how many post offices and posting receptacles there were in London, we should make a wild guess and say perhaps 15,000 or even 20,000. The actual number is 4650. The fact is the average human mind is incapable of realising facts when stated in thousands. Only very experienced men can tell the approximate numbers at a Hyde Park meeting or a royal procession. Post office numbers are bewildering; we simply cannot realise that they are human life expressed in terms of figures. In order to help our limited human faculties, Mr. J. Holt Schooling has estimated that if one man were given the task of sorting all the postal packets delivered in the United Kingdom in one year— and supposing him to work at the rate of sixty a minute— he would have had to begin nearly one hundred and sixty years ago, in the reign of George II., before the conquest of India began under Lord Clive, in order to complete his task by the year 1910. Mr. Schooling gives him no time for sleep or meals; he goes on without stopping. This is indeed harder to realise than the actual number of the postal packets, which is something over 5,000,000,000.