Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 June 1881 — A POSTOFFICE INQUISITION. [ARTICLE]

A POSTOFFICE INQUISITION.

[Washington Cor. New York Sun.) Confederate Brigadier Mahone does not appear to be content with the notoriety he has already achieved. He has now invoked the aid of the Postoffice Department to keep up his fame. The following postal-card, addressed to Senator Vance, of North Carolina, but intercepted at the Washington postoffice and never delivered to him, was the basis of an information lodged against the writer by one W. T. Henderson, an in-, spector of the Postoffice Department, charging a violation of section 3,893 of the Revised Statutes: Please send me yr speech on that damm dog Mahone. John Cabmichael, Middleburg, Loudon county, Va. March 31, 1881. The words used are not actionable, even if “ damm ” had all the force that Carmichael probably intended it should have, to express his scorn of Mahone. Section 3,893 says : * ♦ * No postal-card upon which indecent or scurrilous epithets may be written or printed shall be carried in the mail. This is the flimsy foundation for a prosecution which would be amusing but for the principle involved and for the facts that were disclosed before the Commissioner. That Mahone instigated it is manifest, and that the department became the instrument of his small revenge was made quite clear in the examination. ‘ James E. Bell, superintendent of the city delivery of the Washington Postoffice, was the chief witness. He testified as follows: Q.—By what authority did you read that postal card ? Do you know that it was positively prohibited by law ? A.—Yes, but I considered it my duty and took the risk. Q.—What regulation gives you the authority to peer into the mails? A.—l considered the card obscene and unmailable. Q. —In your experience, as you say, of seventeen years, have you ever known a case of prosecution like this ? A.—Never in the Washington office.

Q.—ls it your habit to suppress postal cards? A.—Frequently. For example: Abusive postal cards are almost daily received against the President, but they never reach him ; we burn them up. * * * He further stated that the post mark showed the card had passed under the eye of the Postmaster General. Upon a most frivolous pretext, and without color of law to justify it, the private correspondence of a citizen is stopped at the postoffice in Washington, and with the privity of the head of the department, merely to gratify the resentment of the repudiating Senator from Virginia. The clerks, with the consent of Mr. James, make inquisitions into the mails, and, as Bell testified, “ take the risk” of arresting what matter they please in defiance of law. He confessed that it was “almost a daily” practice to suppress and burn postal cards abusive of the President.

If this authority can be assumed by subordinates without restraint, where is it to end ? What security is in the mails, when clerks at the terminal points, right under the eye of the Postmaster General, and, as appears in this case, with his full knowledge, may seize and destroy correspondence regularly posted and paid for. This postal card was the property of Senator Vance. It was deliberately withheld from him by the officials of the Washington postoffice after full consultation among themselves. In that act they committed a felony, and, as an example and a protection to the public at large, every one of them should be sternly prosecuted under section 3,892 of the Revised Statutes, as follows: Any person who shall take any letter, postal card or packet, although it does not contain any article of value or evidence thereof, out or a postoffice or branch postoffice, oi - from a letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any postoffice or branch postoffice, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was ad dressed, with a design to obstruct the correspondence or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or shall secrete, embezzle or destroy the same, shall, for every such offenae. be punishable by a fine of not more than SSOO, or imprisonment at hard labor for not more than one year, or both. The insolence of office is past bearing. Private rights are constantly outraged, and public interests are sacrificed by the audacity, corrupt connivance and insulting defiance of the servants of the people. They form a close corporation, organize rings, plunder at pleasure and then ask taxpayers, as Tweed did, “ What are you going to do about it ? ”