POST-OFFICE MARVELS.
A NARRATIVE of Lord St. Germans's first visit to the General Post-office, as its chief, is given in the papers. The scene was quite eventful and romantic. Lord St. Germans has perhaps often put a letter into the slit at a post-office; but he seems to have had no idea of the whirl of business going on at St. Mar- tin's-le-Grand. He is described as being profoundly astonished ; but he seems to have sustained his first fight with no symptom of unmanly alarm. He was astonished at the " facino. ' and sorting of the letters, astonished at their number, astonished at the newspapers. And the newspapers are wonderful. According to the account, there is at one time in the day a perfect hurricane or tornado of newspapers—they fly about like flakes in a snow- storm. The Conservative Peer was nearly buried in the snow. And a " too late " paper, flung by a breathless boy like a snow- ball, struck the Postmaster-General on the breast. Yet he flinched not, but only "smiled," and was astonished. Having undergone that arduous and dusty process, Lord St. Germans retired, with the mails.
But he has not yet satiated his astonishment. Far more sur- prising things remain behind. How much more astonished he will be, for instance, when he learns that all that whirlwind of trouble is a gratuitous though daily sally on the part of the Post- office people ; that, instead of allowing the letters to get into such admired confusion, they might from the first be kept apart in some kind of order. That, instead of suffering the bulk of the metropolitan and national correspondence to accumulate in one place, on purpose to distract the letter-sorters with too much to do at one time, it might be distributed through District Post-offices. That, instead of suffering such huge accumulation at a particular hour, the pressuremightbe relieved by the despatch of mails oftener in the day. That the Office does its work so clumsily as to be afraid of "too much business " ; wherefore divers facilities to the public, in shape of a cheap registration of letters, transmission of parcels, &c., are withheld. When he finds out that, although a part of Rowland Hill's system has triumphed over hostile pro- phecies and hostile administration, having seized firm hold of the public approval, and making steady, unceasing way in the reve- nue accounts ; yet that the remainder of that system, the residue which its author deemed essential to full success, is withheld,— then, will not Lord St. Germans be astonished I
Previous page
