Pass on to the newspaper—not window; for newspapers are a wholesale article: singly they are mere letters; in bulk they are legion. You must go to a door, and there you will see bags piled Olympus high: these are opened and distributed into their respective pouches to go to all parts of the habitable world; for newspapers now are, like letters, “the world’s correspondents.” The inside of the office is now wide awake, the world outside is in arms and “eager for the fray.” Millions of letters go and come, millions of hearts are made glad by a mere stroke of the pen, which passes lightning-like through this postal medium, millions of hearts are alike made sad, and mourn and sob over the one line that brings news of sickness and of death.
The post-office in many points of view presents the appearance of a besieged fort. The chief clerk is at his post: he stands on a platform somewhat elevated above the line of the main floor; his eye glances along the line of clerks, some of whom are at the (port-holes) delivery-windows, awaiting the outward attack. The assault commences, the windows are assailed. Loud voices are heard, one above the rest shouts 2400: this is answered by an immediate discharge from within, which silences battery 2400. These attacks continue along the “box line” until the demand for surrender on the one side is answered by a furious discharge of epistolary ammunition on the other. Both parties retire satisfied with the result. The victory, however, is always on the side of the post-office: the effect of the fire from their port-holes is felt when all within its lines are quiet. The wheels of the department uninjured move on. Let us take a glance through yonder opening. We are on the outside, looking into the interior of this postal fortress. Hundreds of active business-men are moving about in their shirt-sleeves, looking fierce and desperate: they are engaged in a great struggle,—a struggle with time. Some are dragging along the vast extent of flooring large leather pouches, others huge canvas bags: it seems, as you gaze, that they are the bodies of the dead and wounded, the result of the recent attack. Not so; they are mail-bags. See how furiously one is thrown down: it is seized upon as if a victim to be sacrificed. “Brass lock,” yells one. “Iron,” screams another. Brass or iron, they are quickly unlocked, and in an instant their contents are scattered like chaff, and away they go to the four quarters of the globe as fast as busy hands, wind, tide, and steam can take them.
No fort—not even Sumter, Darling, or the defences of Vicksburg—ever presented a more busy scene of life and death than does the post-office on the opening of mail-bags: it may indeed be compared to “life and death;” for, as we have said, it is a “struggle with time.”
And yet what to an outsider might seem all chaos, system has reduced to perfect order; and if the same observer will look once more into the office after these sudden attacks on mail-pouches and bags, he will see the parties sitting quietly down, seemingly well contented with the result of the strife between time, matter, and motion,—the conquerors they.
Mr. William Lewars, author of “Her Majesty’s Mails,” thus describes the scenes which daily occur from 5.45 to 6 o’clock in the London post-office:—
“It is then that an impetuous crowd enters the hall, and letters and newspapers begin to fall in quite a literary hail-storm. The newspaper-window, ever yawning for more, is presently surrounded and besieged by an array of boys of all ages and costumes, together with children of a larger growth, who are all alike pushing, heaving, and surging in one great mass. The window with tremendous gape is assaulted with showers of papers which fly thicker and faster than the driven snow. Now it is that small boys of eleven and twelve years of age, panting, Sinbad-like, under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers, manage somehow to dart about and make rapid sorties into other ranks of boys, utterly disregarding the cries of the official policemen, who vainly endeavor to reduce the tumult into something like post-office order. If the lads cannot quietly and easily disembogue, they will whiz their missiles of intelligence over other people’s heads, now and then sweeping off hats and caps with the force of shot. The gathering every moment increases in number and intensifies in purpose; arms, legs, sacks, baskets, heads, bundles, and woollen comforters—for who ever saw a veritable newspaper-boy without that appendage?—seem to be getting into a state of confusion and disagreeable communism, and ‘yet the cry is still they come.’ Heaps of papers of widely-opposed political views are thrown in together; no longer placed carefully in the openings, they are now sent in in sackfuls and basketfuls, while over the heads of the surging crowd come flying back the empty sacks thrown out of the office by the porters inside. Semi-official legends, with a very strong smack of probability about them, tell of sundry boys being thrown in, seized, emptied, and thrown out again void. As six o’clock approaches still nearer and nearer, the turmoil increases more perceptibly, for the intelligent British public is fully alive to the awful truth that the post-office officials never allow a minute of grace, and that “Newspaper Fair” must be over when the last stroke of six is heard. One, in rush files of laggard boys who have purposely loitered in the hope of a little pleasurable excitement; two, and grown men hurry in with their last sacks; three, the struggle resembles nothing so much as a pantomimic mêlée; four, a Babel of tongues vociferating desperately; five, final and furious showers of papers, sacks, and bags; and six, when all the windows fall like so many swords of Damocles, and the slits close with such a sudden and simultaneous snap, that we naturally suppose it to be a part of the post-office operations that attempts should be made to guillotine a score of hands; and then all is over so far as the outsiders are concerned.
“Among the letter-boxes, scenes somewhat similar have been enacted. Letters of every shape and color, and of all weights, have unceasingly poured in; tidings of life and death, hope and despair, success and failure, triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; letters from friends and notes from lawyers, appeals from children and stern advice from parents, offers from anxious-hearted young gentlemen and ‘first yeses’ or refusals from young maidens, letters containing that snug appointment so long promised you, and ‘little bills’ with requests for immediate payments, ‘together with six-and-eightpence;’ cream-colored missives telling of happy consummations, and black-edged envelopes telling of death and the grave; sober-looking advice notes, doubtless telling when ‘our Mr. Puffwell’ would do himself the honor of calling upon you, and elegant-looking billets, in which business is never mentioned, all jostled each other for a short time; but the stream of gladness and of woe was stopped, at least for one night, when the last stroke of six was heard. The post-office, like a huge monster,—to which one writer has likened it,—has swallowed an enormous meal, and, gorged to the full, it must now commence the process of digestion. While laggard boys, to whom cartoons by one ‘William Hogarth’ should be shown, are muttering, ‘Too late,’ and retiring discomfited, we, having obtained the requisite ‘open sesame,’ will make our way to the interior of the building. Threading our course through several passages, we soon find ourselves among enormous apartments well lit up, where hundreds of human beings are moving about, lifting, shuffling, stamping, and sorting huge piles of letters, and still more enormous piles of newspapers, in what seems at first sight hopeless confusion, but in what is really the most admirable order. In the newspaper-room, men have been engaged not only in emptying the sacks flung in by strong-armed men and weak-legged boys, but also in raking up the single papers into large baskets and conveying them up and down ‘hoists’ into various divisions of the building. Some estimate of the value of these mechanical appliances, moved, of course, by steam-power, may be formed from the fact that hundreds of tons of paper pass up and down these lifts every week. As many of the newspapers escape from their covers in the excitement of posting, each night two or three officers are busily engaged during the whole time of despatch in endeavoring to restore wrappers to newspapers found without any address. Great as is the care exercised in this respect, it will occasionally happen that wrong newspapers will find their way into loose wrappers not belonging to them; and, under the circumstances, it would be by no means a matter of wonder if—as has been more than once pointed out—Mr. Bright should, instead of his ‘Morning Star,’ receive a copy of the ‘Saturday Review,’ or an evangelical curate the ‘Guardian’ or ‘Punch,’ in place of his ‘Record’ paper.
“In the letter-room the officers are no less busily engaged: a number of them are constantly at work, during the hours of the despatch, in the operation of placing each letter with the address and postage-label uppermost, so as to facilitate the process of stamping. In the general post-office the stamping is partly effected by machinery and partly by hand, and consists simply in imprinting upon each letter the date, hour, and place of posting, while at the same time the queen’s head with which the letter is ornamented and franked gets disfigured. It will easily be imagined that a letter containing a box of pills stands a very good chance of being damaged under this manipulation, as a good stamper will strike about fifty letters in a minute. Unpaid letters are kept apart, as they require stamping in a different-colored ink and with the double postage. Such letters create much extra labor, and are a source of incessant trouble to the department, inasmuch as from the time of their posting in London to their delivery at the Land’s End or John O’Groat’s, every officer through whose hands they may pass has to keep a cash account of them. The double postage on such letters is more than earned by the post-office. All unfastened and torn letters, too, are picked out and conveyed to another portion of the large room; and it requires the unremitting attention of several busy individuals to finish the work left undone by the British public. It is scarcely credible that above two hundred and fifty letters are daily posted open, and bearing not the slightest mark of ever having been fastened in any way; but such is the fact. A fruitful source of extra work to this branch of the office arises through the posting of flimsy boxes containing feathers, slippers, and other récherché articles of female dress, pillboxes containing jewelry, and even bottles. The latter, however, are detained, glass articles and sharp instruments of any sort, whenever detected, being returned to the senders. These frail things, thrown in and buried under the heaps of correspondence, get crushed and broken: yet all are made up again carefully and resealed.
“When the letters have been stamped, and those insufficiently paid picked out, they are carried away to undergo the process of sorting. In this operation they are very rapidly divided into ‘roads,’ representing a line of large towns: thus, letters for Derby, Loughborough, Nottingham, Lincoln, etc., might be placed in companionship with one division or ‘road,’ and Bilston, Wednesbury, Walsall, West Bromwich, etc., in another.”
As we have stated, the immense amount of business transacted in the post-offices of large cities is not unfrequently lost sight of,—business transactions of a nature that few understand or comprehend, and which exercise an influence on men and nations equally as powerful as that of the press.