Humors of the U. S. Postal Service

New Zealand Tablet, 17 August 1911, Page 1559

Humors of the U. S. Postal Service

In view of the announcement that Secretary Hitchcock has succeeded in wiping out the postal deficit, the following from the World's Work, calling attention to some of the glaring features of the postal ' graft,' should be of interest:

'By mail, you may now send packages weighing more than four pounds to forty-three foreign countries —but not to any part of the United States of the Union. ' If you live in New York, you may send a tenpound package by mail to Tokio—.but not to Brooklyn. If it weigh only four pounds, it may go by mail to Brooklyn for 64 —but four pounds to" Germany costs only 48 cents. ' These are not little jokes perpetrated on the public by the Post Office Department; they are . facts ■ which have grown naturally out of the deep interest that the express companies have taken in the distribution of merchandise by mail. If you insist upon having the same parcel service to Chicago or St. Louis that you have to Berlin or Marseilles, how do you expect the express companies to make a living?' Another little joke on the dull-witted public has been published in The Survey; it is a photograph of a delivery waggon in New York City labelled: ' Parcel Agency for the Imperial German Mail.' The idea is that Germany now offers in New York a service that the United States Government will not renderjust as the German Government has set up a post office in Tangier, with German postage stamps, because Morocco is not progressive enough to establish offices itself.