20 AUGUST 1831, Page 16

THE POST-OFFICE AND THE PRESS.

AFrEn our -free remarks, last week, on the Post-Office arrange- ments for the transmission of newspapers to the country, it be- comes a point of honour with us to state, that one of the instances of non-deliveiy, referred to in our last Number, has been perfectly accounted for by Sir FRANCIS FREELING. The packet of papers intended for a correspondent in Edinburgh, has been found in the repositories of the General Post-Office in London ; the cover bears the name of the gentleman to whom the packet should have gone, but not the name of the town. From this we perceive, that the senders of newspapers are sometimes at least to blame for their non-arrival ; and that one of the numerous sources of miscarriage is imperfect direction. In apology for our public complaint, Ilhich is thus shown to have been so far inaccurate, we must aserve, that we had made a private complaint eight days before, and that until our public complaint appeared, no tidings of the missing packet reached us.

Another source of non-delivery is mentioned by an anonymous correspondent. He says, that as the door of the Post-Office is shutting at six o'clock, newsmen's boys who arrive late are in the habit of throwing papers at the door, in the hope of their being received ; and that frequently, some of them miss the diminishing aperture, and are not afterwards picked up. With respect to those readers in the country, whose papers are, in the first instance, read in town, there are numerous sources of loss and delay, to which perhaps no 'remedy is applicable. Nei- ther do we say that a remedy is applicable to every case of error occurring in the regular channels of transmission. What we wish the Post-Office to do, is to inquire into the various causes of non- transmission—to separate the accidental from the constant, the remediable from the remediless—to point out to the public where they alone are to blame, and to amend the practice where the blame lies with the Post-Office.

In the case of misdirection, the remedy is clear,—let the paper be 'sent back to the publishing-office ; or let the address be ex- posed at the Post-Office, as the addresses of misdirected letters are. By the latter very simple expedient, the newsmen could readily ascertain whether any error of address had been committed by their clerks. We have reason to believe that at length the attention of the Post- Office authorities is seriously directed to this subject ; and we hope that in a few weeks we shall witness the fruits of it.