The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-12-22
Advertiser Bureau.
 Colorado Building,

%tt 4 Washington. Dec. 2l. The Senate Select Committee on Dis position of Useless Papers in the Ex- ecutive Departmenss of which sena- tor Pettus is Chairman. and Senators Bate and Long. of Kansas. are mem bers. with the Joint select committee of the House. of which Messrs. Bates ot Pennsylvania, and Bassett of New York, are members. has at last gotten down to work and found that they had no little task before him.
 The accumulation of documents and waste paper in the departments is something almost incidentally enorm- ous.
 But your Uncle Sar, is not wasteful about his scraps. He has his boys in the departments to pick up all bits of strings, waste paper and other odds and ends that make up the fiotsam and jetsam of the tide, of departmental bus mess, and put them aside to be sold later to the highest bidder.
 The receipts ofs-a number of the larger postonnoes of the, country are increased by the sale of this so-called waste material. and it is said that the total sales of the stun aggregates s25,000 a year. or enough to pay the salaries of the Postmaster General and his assistants. This revenue comes from the larger postof1ces of the East, while most of the others find waste paper a burden and have to pay to have 1t hauled away. The big Eastern pa- per mills work over the old paper, buy ing 1t wherever they can get 1t in jus tifiable quantities.
 An immense quantity of this waste paper comes from the Postofice Depart ment and is made up of newspapers mailed as second class matter. Papers not correctly addressed find their way to the scrap pile in the basement of the postoffice or the department build- ing. Postal regulations do not permit the local postmaster to notify the sender that the paper is unclaimed. the labor in such notification costing more than the worth of the stamp on the wrapper.
 Inspection for Treasurer.
 But the Postoffice Department is not the only branch of the executive gov ernment which practices methodical economy.
 In the basement of the Treasury De- partment sit side by side from day to day two keen-eyed women who spend their working hours going through the contents of the departments hundreds of waste baskets.
 They search for stray bonds. checks and bills that may. through some error or carelessness have fallen there. Not scrap of paper Is permitted to be carried out of the department until it has passed the scrutiny of the official examiners of the vast baskets. There is a. rule in the service that no envel- ope. letter or slip of paper shall be cast into the waste basket until 1t has teen torn or otherwise mutilated. the disfiguring being a sign to the exam iners that the papers were Intentionally put into the baskets. So a sharp look out is kept for unmarked envelopes or official looking papers. It has hap pened that a gust of wind has carried bond or check from an officers desk and whisked it into the convenient bas- ket; but there it is almost as safe as though 1t were in a vault to be taken out when needed. as the argus-eyed watchers may be relied upon to restore them to the proper custodian.
 | It Is said that these waste-basket | women in spectors have saved the Gov | ernment the amount of their salaries many times over every year. few years ago one of them saved s1O.O0O United States coupon bond. Long ser