I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us.
If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning—should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose I would do?
Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on Mr. Burleson.
But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the Post are both going to get out of that extra column.
I am going to do what I have done over and over before.
Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.
Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G. S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert Sidney Burleson will be over.
Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr. Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson has about himself—four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top.
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.
Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land.