No further mention is made of the service until the Report dated 31st March, 1908, which says that the special delivery service had been extended to thirteen places where free carrier service had been installed,[200] and further that "the regulations respecting special delivery have been so modified that it is no longer necessary for a person despatching a letter, which he desires to have delivered immediately, to provide himself with the 'special delivery' stamp issued by the department. He may now place upon his letter ordinary postage stamps to the value of ten cents in addition to the stamps required for prepayment of postage and write across the corner of the envelope the words 'special delivery'. This will ensure the special delivery of the letter as provided for in the regulations."
The Report for 1909 states that the service has been extended to the eight places where free letter delivery by carrier had been installed during the year.[201]
[200] See [page 197].
[201] Ibid.
CHAPTER XX
THE "OFFICIALLY SEALED" LABELS
Strictly speaking, the so-called "officially sealed stamps" are not stamps, as that term is technically employed in philately. To the uninitiated any design impressed upon a label, whether gummed and perforated or not, may be termed a stamp; but the ordinarily accepted use of the term has been restricted, at least in philatelic lore, to the label that represents a value, collected or chargeable, in the service in which it is employed. There may therefore be postal, telegraph or fiscal stamps, and because of the identity in use—to show that no fee is required,—we can stretch our definition to include franking labels, such as are often used officially. But the "officially sealed" label performs no such function, and is, as its name implies, simply a seal which fulfils that purpose alone and therefore does not properly belong in the company of postage stamps. Our only reason for touching upon these labels here is that they have been included in some of the catalogs for years and many collectors possess them; consequently it seems desirable to give their history along with that of their more worthy prototypes.
The label figured as Number 117 on [Plate X], seems to have been first reported in Le Timbre-Poste for October, 1879, and its date of issue is usually given as that year. But little seems to have been known about it for some time, which perhaps was partly due to its scarcity and partly because it did not attract the notice that a regular postage stamp issue would have.
The London Society's book quoted a somewhat ambiguous explanation of the use to which the label was put, which had appeared in the Halifax Philatelist;[202] but it remained for Major Evans to clear up the matter in the columns of the Philatelic Record.[203] We cannot do better than quote this in full:—