Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/601

Rh UNITED STATES.] P O S T-O F F I C E 579 by Act of Congress, approved 3d March 1847, and on 1st June 1856 prepayment by stamps was made compulsory. In 1863 a uniform rate of postage without regard to dis tance was fixed at three cents, and on 1st October 1883, after satisfactory evidence had been given of the surplus income from the operations of the post-office establishment for the two preceding fiscal years, the rate was further reduced to two cents, the equivalent of the British penny postage. It will be seen that no time was lost in giving to the public the benefit of the change for the better in the condition of the postal finances, and to this liberality is undoubtedly due in great measure the deficit of $5,204,484-12 for the year 1884, a deficiency which, how ever, it is reasonable to expect, will decrease from year to year under the stimulus given to correspondence by the cheapened rate. It is hardly remarkable, in view of the great area of the United States, that for a long time dis tance should have formed a very material element in the calculations for levying postal tribute. The franking privilege, which had grown to be an in tolerable abuse, was finally abolished in 1873, and the post-office now carries free under official &quot; penalty &quot; labels or envelopes (i.e., envelopes containing a notice of the legal penalty for their unauthorized use) nothing but matter which is of a strictly official character, with the single exception of newspapers circulated within the county of publication. As late as 1860 the mails conveyed nothing but written and printed matter. They now admit nearly every known substance which does not exceed four pounds in weight (this restriction does not apply to single books), and which from its nature is not liable to injure the mails or the persons of postal employes. The railway mail service, including the &quot;fast mail,&quot; the character of which is from the necessity of the case peculiar, and which, in its methods and results, has reached a perfection attainable only in a country of great extent, was inaugurated in 1864 after a successful experiment upon a few of the large railroad lines with important termini. In 1865 one thousand and forty one miles of railway post-office service were in operation, employing sixty -four clerks. The service was reorganized in 1874 with eight territorial divisions, each in charge of a superin tendent subordinate to a general superintendent at the seat of government. This service was one of the earliest exponents of a classified civil service in the more recent acceptation of that term in the United States, appointment of railway postal clerks having always been made for a probationary period, permanent appointment conditioned upon satisfactory conduct and service, and removal based upon good cause only. On 1st July 1884 &quot;there were about four thousand clerks in the railway mail service, and the length of the routes was 117,160 miles. The annual transportation (aggregate distance over which the mails were conveyed) was 142,541,392 miles. At the same date the length of the &quot;star service&quot; routes (i.e., mail service other than by railway or steamboat) was 226,779 miles and the annual transportation 81,109,052 miles, while the length of the steamboat routes was 15,591 miles with an annual transportation of 3,882,288 miles, which does not include conveyance of mails by sea to foreign countries. The penny post existed in a number of cities of the Union in 1862, the carriers remunerating themselves by the collection of a voluntary fee of from one to two cents on each piece of mail delivered. A uniform free delivery system was first authorized by law on 3d March 1863, and was established on the succeeding 1st of July in forty- nine cities. The number of carriers employed the first year was 685. On 1st July 1884 there were 3890 letter- carriers in one hundred and fifty-nine &quot; free delivery cities.&quot; To the European reader this number will doubtless appear to be remarkably small in a country whose population, according to the census of 1880, was over 50,000,000, but it should be observed that, outside of the larger cities and towns, the people as a rule reside on detached farms of greater or less size, at considerable distances from each other, and not, as in many of the European states, congregated in small towns or villages, separated from their farms ; from this circumstance it happens that rural factors or carriers have never been, and could not well be, employed as in European countries. The registry system, in which great improvements have been made within the last few years, did not attain any degree of excellence until after 1860; and the money-order system was first established in 1864. The aggregate num ber of money orders, domestic and foreign, issued during the fiscal year 1883-84 was 8,314,963, of the value of $129,810,038 51. Postal notes for small sums, payable to bearer, and resembling the British postal orders except in that they are not drawn for fixed amounts, were first issued to the public in September 1883, and during the first ten months there were 3,689,237 notes sold of the aggregate value of $7,411,992 48. Money orders are ex changed, in pursuance of postal conventions for the pur pose, with most of the important countries of the world which have money-order systems of their own. The total staff of the post-office in 1884 numbered Late 71,671, of whom 50,017 were postmasters. For the same statistics, year the total number of letters delivered in 159 cities was 524,431,327. The number of post-cards delivered in the same cities was 166,652,429, and the number of news papers 231,645,185. The number of registered letters and parcels sent through the mails was 11,246,545, and the total ascertained losses numbered 516, or in the ratio of 1 to 21,795. During the same year the total number of pieces of mail handled or distributed en route on the cars by railway postal clerks was 4,519,661,900, of which number 2,795,447,000 were letters, a total increase over the previous year of 13|- per cent., the transactions of that year having themselves exceeded those of the year 1882 by nearly 16 per cent. The sales of stamps, &c., for the year amounted to $40,745,853 66, showing that almost the entire revenues of the service are derived from postages. The total estimated number of letters sent to foreign countries was 33,328,014, of post-cards 1,672,458, of packets of newspapers, etc., 20,712,464, and of packages of samples of merchandise 297,048. There were received from foreign countries 28,404,035 letters, 1,288,673 post cards, 21,747,784 packets of newspapers, &c., and 519,561 packets of samples of merchandise. The total number of articles of undelivered mail received in the dead -letter office was 4,843,099, of which number 4,752,483 were letters, being nearly a million less than the number which reached the British returned-letter office. Useful printed matter which cannot be returned is distributed amongst the inmates of various hospitals, asylums, and charitable and reformatory institutions in the District of Columbia, and in 1884 23,152 magazines, pamphlets, ifec., were thus disposed of. Three years after the passage by the British parliament of the Tele- Electric Telegraph Act (1868-69) the subject of a similar transfer graphs, of the rights of the telegraph companies to the post-office of the United States was strongly urged by the postmaster -general of that country, Mr Creswell, and he renewed his recommendations the succeeding year ; the subject also recurred at intervals in the annual reports of the post-office department for subsequent years. In 1882 Mr Howe admitted that he had been &quot;forced to the con clusion that the time has fully come when the telegraph and postal service should be embraced under one management&quot;; a year later, however, Mr Gresharn states that he &quot;should hesitate to sanction a measure providing that the United States shall become the proprietor of telegraph lines and operate them by its officers and