POST HASTE Sul,—Your correspondents, Messrs. D. Groyther Moore and St.
John Ervine, are no doubt justified front their point of view in their complaints concerning a postal service that irsakes a profit of £36,000,000. With your permission I wish to underline the claim that the service, despite the higher charges, has deteriorated. My home is on an island, the historical Isle of Lismore. But unlike other island communities, we are not adrift in distant waters. A ferry, 1,200 yards wide—it is less when the tide is out—separates us from ,the mainland, where a good road connects with the railway three miles away. By rail, access is had to and from all parts of Great Britain and the rest of the world. Despite our accessibility, however, delivery and collection of mails are provided on four days of the week only. A person belonging to Lismore can leave Edinburgh or Glasgow on Monday by the same train as carries his daily newspaper and be home that day for lunch; his newspaper, however, will not be delivered until late on Wednesday afternoon. Lt is no exaggeration to say that the mail service to Lismore was much better in the days of queen Victoria than it is to-day; that it was equally good more than a hundred years ago; and that it was not much worse at the end of the eighteenth century. Records show that in 1790 mails were collected and delivered on three days a week, when they were conveyed to and from the south by runner. In 1840, long before the railway arrived in Argyll, there was a daily service, and the newspaper published in Edinburgh or Glasgow in the morning was in Lismore early the following day. Queen Victoria, as a special request on her Jubilee, laid it as an obligation on the Postmaster General to provide where at all po.;.sible a daily service for her subjects. Can it be that the Postmaster General cannot administer this national service because he did not nationalise it himself? Someone should tell him that it is not yet a national service, and that if he only spends these millions wisely in providing equal facilities and privileges for all the King's subjects, he need no longer be odd man out in this ploy of nationalisation
among his colleagues.—Yours faithfully, IAN CARMICHAEL. The Manse, Lismore, Argyll.
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