Cheaper Telegrams—More Telephones There have been so many improvements in
Post Office services recently that the Postmaster-General is entitled to double congratulations in following the 1897 Jubilee precedent, and offering yet further reductions in charges and expansion of services. The telegram has.for long been under a cloud owing to its supersession by the telephone. and the telegraphic department is one of the few in the Post Office which show a loss. The reduction of the charge to sixpence for the first nine words should bring it back into more general use, and we are now officially invited to use this form of correspondence for congratulatory messages—of which Englishmen, it appears, are prodigal, and the Scots sparing. This-is only one of several import- ant projects, a notable one being the decision to have a public telephone in every village which has a post-office. Rural telephones, it will be remembered, had a place in Mr. Lloyd George's reconstruction schemes years ago. A small but practical point : the telephones should be in kiosks outside the post-offices, so as to be available at all hours.
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