Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1898 — Uncle Sam Has a Trust. [ARTICLE]

Uncle Sam Has a Trust.

It costs the Government now just 5 cents for 1,000 stamps delivered anywhere in the United States. One thousand 2-eent stamps are sold for S2O. It will thus be seen that Uncle Sam has a trust worth having, and that his profits are not to be despised even by a bloated bondholder. In fact, Uncle Sam is envied so much by other capitalists frequently other parties start into tho business of printing stamps, without first securing a Mcense, or even trying to get one. Sometimes the secret service office catches the guilty parties, but in case due discretion is exercised the counterfeiting of stamps is not very difficult, as little close attention is bestowed upon them in the mails. But the expense is so great and the returns so small that the counterfeiters do not linger long at a stamp job. ■ During a single year the bureau of printing and engraving prints about $80,000,000 worth of stamps. This is over an average of $1 per head for every inhabitant of the United States, and indicates that we are a great race of letter writers, assuming that each person writes one letter a week. All people who write letters, however, are not thoughtful enough to prepay them. Some idea of the number of delinquent correspondents who like to semi their letters postage due may be obtained from the fact that during the last fiscal year the value of the postage-due stamps affixed to letters without sufficient postage aggregated $450,058, mostly in 1-cent and 2-cent stamps.