“What do we want with this vast worthless area; this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, shifting sands, and whirlwinds of dust; of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use can we hope to put these great deserts or those endless mountain ranges, imposing and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What use have we for such country? Mr. President, I will never vote 1 cent from the Public Treasury to place the Pacific Coast 1 inch nearer to Boston than it now is.”
“I can safely venture,” said Hon. D. C. Roper, late First Assistant Postmaster General in his speech at the Denver, Colo., Convention of the National Association of Postmasters, in July, 1913, from which this extract is made, “that were Mr. Webster to return to earth and accompany me on this western trip he would confess in chagrin that in no expression made during his long career as a public speaker was he wider of the mark.”
A Blind Woman on the Pay Roll
It is wonderful how the blind, those who have been denied by nature or accident of the most priceless of all human faculties, can adapt themselves to conditions whereby the means of support may be obtained. All communities and great centers of population have doubtless such cases, especially where opportunities are afforded by private munificence or public appropriation, but there are perhaps few cases where, in Government service, it is possible for a blind person to find an opportunity to earn a living. The Mail Bag Repair Shop at Washington furnishes such a case and it is worthy of notice.
Twenty-six years ago a blind girl, Miss Hattie Maddox, called to see Postmaster General Wanamaker and asked for a place in the bag shop. She said, “You give seeing people a two months’ trial at the work, will you give me that much time to prove that I can do it?” She then went to Colonel Whitfield, Second Assistant Postmaster General, who had charge of such work, and showed him some crocheting she had done and the opportunity she sought was given her. She is there today busy with a pile of mail bags, stringing them with new cords, finding weak spots and repairing them with needle and thread and does the work as well as any of those around her. An attendant from her home brings her to her daily task and calls for her, and she is one of the most contented and happy women on Uncle Sam’s pay roll.
Mr. Wanamaker’s Four Great Postal Reforms
Marshall Cushing, private secretary to Postmaster General Wanamaker, says in his book “The Story of Our Post Office,” published some years ago, that Mr. Wanamaker had in mind and frequently discussed with public men, four great postal propositions, one of which this administration is now vigorously pushing forward, while the other three are still in abeyance. These propositions were the postal telegraph, the postal telephone, rural free delivery and house-to-house collections of mail. He regarded them as simple and easy business propositions.
The first proposed that the thousands of letter carriers of the Department should help the telegraph companies collect and deliver messages, and that a few clerks in a central bureau at Washington could manage the stamp department and do the book-keeping for this part of the business of the companies. Telegrams were to be written on stamped paper, sold by the Department, or upon any sort of paper provided with stamps sold by the Department, and be deposited as in the case of letters whether on the streets or attached for collection and delivery purposes at house doors. These postal telegrams were to be collected by carriers on their regular tours of collection and telegraphed to the destinations and taken out and delivered in the first delivery. Answer to be sent off exactly in the same way.