Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1859-03-19
TO ADVERTISERS,
EXPRESSES AND POST OFFICES.

The Post Office Department, in spite of our
almost marvellous facilities for intercommuni-
cation, is very "slow coach" 1t is almost
always in trouble; and its burdens are not
equally distributed among the States. Massa-
chusetts pays for its support more in month
than South Carolina in year. The free
States together furnish threefourths of its
business and pay three-fourths of the cost
while their business involves much less than
half the expense of the mail service. The
great increase of expense which has involved
the department in difficulties, is due partly to
foolish experiments, such as the overland route
to California and partly to an extravagant in
crease of the pay for mail service in the South
western States. The service in that section it
is said, which, until recently, did not exceed
two millions of dollars, now costs four millions.
On account of an unsuccessful attempt to
make the cost of the department more bur-
densome and unequal, Senator Toombs and
others did not scruple to defeat the post office
appropriation bill, which renders it impracti-
cable, if not impossible, for the department to
go on beyond the thirtieth of June, which ter
inmates its present fiscal year. If the Presi-
dent does not call an extra session of Congress,
this emergency cannot be provided for, and
public attention has been directed to the posi-
bility of having no Post Office Department at
all in actual operation.
There can be no doubt of the propriety of
government aid for the means and instrument
A. IL IL
the post Office system is the most useful and
efficient agency we have for promoting mutual
good understanding, and certain community
of sentiment and intelligence, between differ
ent sections of the country But it is not in
dispensble; and it would not be the greatest
of calamites fit should suspend operations
long enough for the people to put other postal
machinery in operation. In our view it would
soon apear that the government system for the
transportation of letters is not the most practical
bic system possible, and certainly not the speedi-
est nor the safest Business men have an in
stinctive distrust of post-ofices, when their
most valuable messages or packages are to be
delivered or received; and they patronize the
expresses.
1sl An that better postaI, alysteA which might
spring up fom the ruins of re present
troubled and troubling establishments "ouiu
be cheaper as well as more efficient. %5dt
all the good things of our post Office ma
chinery in the hands of a perfectly or.
ganized express, whose agents get their ap-
pointments, not as brides or rewards, for par
tizan services, but on account of their eminent
fitness for such service, and there would be
ayast improveme Mt. After little jar perhaps,
at the start, the business would be transacted
with such safety, rapidity, and economy as
even the model postal systems of England and
France have not yet attained.
The carriage and delivery of letters are kin
dred to the carriage and delivery of small
packages. They might be sent together mn
der the the same regulations. The towns are
almost innumerable where the express wagon
and mail wagon might be the same, while
some of those almost interminable and useless
mail routes, reaching, if extended one after
another, many times round the globe, would
give way to the control of common sense and
common business sagacity Thus we should
have post routes regulated just as other mat
tiers of business are regulated; and post ex-
presses would be established, as men estab-
.lish stores and mills, or build hotels and meet
ing houses, whenever there are people enough
congregated to sustain them.
We do not mean to say that such an expert
ment would be successful on the first day of its
trial, and give us an absolutely perfect system
within week afterwards Every important en-
terprise must in the beginning undergo some
failures, and have various experiences of imper-
feet operation; but, whatever Inconvenience
might attend its initiation, would be felt mostin
those States which furnish least support to the
government system, and which have been most
instrumental in defeating necessary appropria-
tons for its support. We wish it could be tried.