Waterbury evening Democrat., 1895-08-23

very recent Oate. fOf thousands O1 years mankind got along without any postal system at all. For thousands of years ordinary letters were carried by whenever chanccd 10 be jOurncying ill tho direction they must be sent. Elk tra0rdinary letters, those upon business
 of the state and the truly great of the
 earth were sent by carriers. Tho first
 of these two methods was very uncertain and tho second altogether too expensive for general adoption, and hence it fell out that few, even of the 'classes, y
 wrote often, while, among the masses,
 he who had in his life written and dis patched a half dozen letters was a rare exception. But Gs the enlightcD- ment of the masses, infectionlike,
 spread from land to land, the worlds
 postal system was developed. First,
 letters were regularly borne from place
 to place fer hire by common carriers;
 then, little by little, governments took
 up letter transportation, and, by 1860,
 each nation had q complete postal sys-
 tenn within its own borders
 Still there was no uniformity of rates between nations. and i'll lSG2 John A. Kus>um, then in congress from Iowa,
 suggested to Postmaster General Mont
 Gumtry Blair that the complexities and incunvcuicnccs of international
 mail delivery might greatly be lessened
 by th" holding of Il worlds convention
 of postal fliciuls This seemed well to
 N1r. Blair, and he, i'll turn, mentioned
 the proposition to William A. Seward, thea secretary of state. He communi-
 catcd with the postal authorities of va
 rious nations and SO many favorable re plies were received that on May II,
 lS63 the first postal congress began it's
 sessions in Paris, delegates being pres
 ent from 15 countries, chiefly European. Though but little was accomplished by the deliberations of that first con
 gress, the ice was broken, so to speak,
 and the w1y paved for more fruitful
 sessions ill the future During the next six years tho United States authorities
 did l lot of postal reformatory work by | dint of pure American pluck, persuasion and rcrScYCrlncr-a trio that will often | win when well handled. By 1870 re- duCtirTS i'll postage between the United States and some half hundred other na- | tions had been effected. The rate to Germany Was cut down from 2S cents | to :, that to tIyeNt Britain from 24 to 6, etc. In 1874 q second postal congress
 Was held, this time at Bern. Switzcr land, representatives of numerous gov crnmcntS being present, and organiza- tions being effected under the title of | the General Postal union. Very much | Was accomplished at this gathering, | most important perhaps being the adOp | tion of q uniform half ounce letter rate | of , cents or 9l confines, and l cent or cCntilnoS for each two ounces or 60 | grams rf printed matter. In lSIS ut the | third congress tn" Hamo Was changed to | the Universal Postal union, an1 pro | vision for registration Was made, and at still subsequent congresses held in London in 1885 and Vienna in 1891 | other improvements were adopted. The | next congress is to be held in Washing | ton in May, 1896, and Edmund HOehn, | the director of the international bureau of tho Universal Postal union, with | headquarters at Bprn, Switzerland, has
 recently visited the United States ill or | der to make preparations for the coming | gathering,
 The chief objects of the international
 bureau of the union are to gather and
 publish all sorts of information concern
 ing postal matters, to arrange differ
 ences between postal authorities of vari-
 ous countries, to disseminate informa-
 tion regarding new rules-in short, to
 act as a sort of clearing house for the
 worlds postal business. One of the
 things to be considered at the coming
 congress is the proposition to reduce
 the international rate to cents half
 ounce, another the proposition for an
 international postage stamp and anoth-
 CT the adoption of written constitu- tiOn.