Page:The Post Office of India and its story.djvu/133

Rh last article being the most prevalent everywhere. Letters were sorted on the floor for convenience, and the delivery table with its ragged occupants, who did duty for postmen, was a sight for the gods.

The position of a post office in a town is a matter of the first importance, but the chief object of the authorities in the early days of the Imperial Post Office seems to have been economy. As a building in a back street naturally costs less than one in a main street, many of the city offices are hidden away in the most inaccessible slums. It is, indeed, a case of Mohamed and the mountain, and the Post Office, secure in its monopoly, was not going to afford any unnecessary conveniences to its clients. Many of my readers will doubtless recall some of those upstairs offices in big cities, which do an enormous amount of work, especially in the afternoon, the approach being a single staircase just broad enough for one person to ascend. Imagine the turmoil at the busy hours of the day. In Bara Bazar, Calcutta, and Benares City, two famous instances which come to mind at the moment, where there is a heavy despatch of parcels, the confined space round the parcel windows was the scene of a petty riot every afternoon. Such a state of affairs could not exist for a month in a country where the better class of people perform their own post office business; unfortunately in India all this kind of work is done by native messengers who are not particular about the surroundings of an office and usually have plenty of time to spare. Things, however, improved in recent years under the direction of Sir Arthur Fanshawe and Sir Charles Stewart-Wilson, both of whom had the critical faculty strongly developed. Assisted by the genius of Mr. James Begg, Consulting Architect to the Government