INSUFFICIENTLY PAID LETTERS.

Daily Southern Cross, Volume XXII, Issue 2712, 27 March 1866, Page 5

INSUFFICIENTLY PAID LETTERS.

Amongst many grievances, there is one connected with the Post-office to which we desire to direct public attention. It is not, however, any complaint against the officials, who are very often blamed for what they have no power whatever to amend, but of the system of management recently introduced, so far as it relates to insufficiently paid letters. In a mercantile community like this, it very often happens, that letters are sent to the post insufficiently paid; and the old practice was to arrest the letter, open it and ascertain the writer, and if he resided within an easy distance of the Post-office, to send it back without delay. Wo doubt this plan gave some trouble to the officials, but it was often the means of saving a post, the loss of which, through the inadvertence or neglect of servants, might have entailed ruin or embarrassment on many highly respectable men. But the "wise men of Gotham," who now preside over^he Post-office, have adopted another plan. It is not, we regret to say, any improvement on the old one. The duty of postmasters now is to arrest all insufficiently paid letters, and post a list, in writing, outside the office every three months, setting forth the address of all such letters. At the end of seven days after this publication, if the letters are unclaimed, they are gent to Wellington, opened at the Dead-letter Office, and returned through the post to the writers. This system involves delay, needless expense, and it may be inflicts serious injury on individuals who never intended defrauding the revenue of a farthing. The publication of the list is a simple farce. A hundred chances to one ijihe writer of an insufficiently paid letter never sees the list, and if by chance

such an one sees a long list hanging outside the Post-office, it will hardly strike him tbat any of his letters come within the unpaid category. Either the old plan ought, where practicable, to be resorted to, or the list of underpaid letters should be advertised in a local paper.