THE POSTAL CARD.
NO one denies that the postal card is a great thing, and yet it makes most people mad to get one This is because we naturally feel sensitive about having our correspondence open to the eye of the postmaster and postal clerk. Yet they do not read them. Postal employés hate a postal card as cordially as anyone else. If they were banished and had nothing to read but a package of postal cards, or a foreign book of statistics, they would read the statistics. This wild hunger for postal cards on the part of postmasters is all a myth. When the writer don't care who sees his message, that knocks the curiosity out of those who handle those messages. A man who would read a postal card without being compelled to by some stringent statute, must be a little deranged. When you receive one, you say, "Here's a message of so little importance that the writer didn't care who saw it. I don't care much for it, myself." Then you look it over and lay it away and forget it. Do you think that the postmaster is going to wear out his young life in devouring literature that the sendee don't feel proud of when he receives it? Hay, nay.
During our official experience we have been placed where we could have read postal cards time and again, and no one but the All-seeing Eye would have detected it; but we have controlled ourself and closed our eyes to the written message, refusing to take advantage of the confidence reposed in us by our government, and those who thus trusted us with their secrets. All over our great land every moment of the day or night these little cards are being silently scattered, breathing loving words inscribed with a hard lead pencil, and shedding information upon sundered hearts, and they are as safe as though they had never been breathed.
They are safer, in most instances, because they cannot be read by anybody in the whole world.
That is why it irritates us to have some one open up a conversation by saying, "You remember what that fellow wrote me from Cheyenne on that postal card of the 25th, and how he rounded me up for not sending him those goods?" Now we can't keep all those things in our head. It requires too much of a strain to do it on the salary we receive. A man with a very large salary and a tenacious memory might keep run of the postal correspondence in a small office, but we cannot do it. We are not accustomed to it, and it rattles and excites us.