From the little room which we have termed the “distribution-room,” letters are sent and scattered over the area named above, to the full amount of 18,000 daily, not including those called “city drops.” The distributor is to know, or is supposed to know, apart from consulting the directory, the name of every street, lane, and alley, as well as their locality, so that he can place the letters so directed into their separate pigeon-holes, both for the city carriers and the “subs.” He has to observe the limits of certain routes, and see that his letters do not go astray, thus causing a delay in the delivery of at least twenty-four hours. Many letters are received without direction, and others, again, so imperfectly given that it requires the exercise of a little of Job’s patience, assisted by an imperfect directory, to find out where they actually belong. The carriers, however, to whom these letters are submitted, being familiar with the names of persons on their routes, select from this débris of letters those that they think belong to the parties to whom they are so carelessly directed. A good carrier never brings back a letter to the office until he is fully satisfied that it is not on his route. Philadelphia can boast of such.
This retentive quality is also powerfully exercised at the box-windows. There are 2600 boxes, which we may say will average six letters each daily, thus making an aggregate of 15,600. These letters are selected from the “pile” by clerks, who actually know not only the names of the owners of the boxes, but the names of those who are entitled to their use,—as, for instance, the clerks and porters of the parties engaging them. This is what we term a wonderful exercise of memory and its practical application. Newspapers are distributed on the same principle as are the letters.
The newspaper department of a post-office is one that may well be called the “reservoir” of the press: here flows all that makes up that vast institution, here comes the highest standard of our literature, down to the meanest sheet venality produces. A number of men are constantly employed in the newspaper room, or, as we term it, “the rotunda of literature.” This is emphatically the wholesale room; for they deal in bulk. Papers coming singly, directed to individuals, pass through the same process as do the letters. The packages directed to neighboring cities find their way through the “rotunda” in canvas bags to their respective places of destination. Let us here say one word of
THE PRESS.
It has identified itself with, and forms one of the main features of, our great republic. Its very liberty is essential to the nature of a free state. Its complicity and power claim for it a consideration which no other department of literature and science, however popular, can attain. The press of our country is now the medium, if not, in fact, the very source, of that knowledge of which as a nation we are so justly proud.
The work of the post-office is of such a nature, changing its character with every new incumbent, that it is utterly impossible to reduce it to a system of permanent order during one term of office. Move, however, it must, right or wrong: hence it is that some portion of its machinery may get out of order and thus militate against the probability of reaching perfection. Perfection! and who seeks perfection in any of the institutions established by man? Nature alone “is perfect indeed.” It was so from the beginning, not only in its elements and principles, but in its members and its organs.
“The post-office,” says a writer in “Fraser’s Magazine” for September 2, 1862, “no longer assumes to be perfect, and its conductors have renounced their claims to infallibility. Suggested improvements, if they can sustain the indispensable test of rigid scrutiny, are welcomed, and not, as of old, frowned away. The department acts under the conviction that to thrive it must discard the confidence heretofore placed in legal prohibitions, and seek its continuance of prosperity only by deserving it.”
The English post-office has far better opportunities of rendering its system more perfect than it is, from the fact that its clerks are not discharged on every change made in the heads of the department by the government. They are fixtures. But in this country no one engaged in a public office under one administration can calculate being continued under another.
A clerk in the post-office, being appointed for an especial duty, troubles himself very little about that of any other. He takes no interest in the general business or details of the office, from the fact that his situation is not a permanent one: hence it is that few postmasters are enabled, within four years, to bring the office out of the chaos into which a previous administration had reduced it, so as to congratulate himself upon making one step towards perfection. He has to study the political elements outside first, and by the time these are reconciled, nearly one-third of his term has expired. In another portion of this work we have alluded to this political clog placed against the wheels of the postal department, and retarding, if not materially impairing, its social, moral, and financial interests.