Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1876 — Mark Twain on Postoffice Management [ARTICLE]

Mark Twain on Postoffice Management

To the Editor of the N. T. Evening Post: Now when there is so much worrying and wailing and legislating about economy in postage, may 1 ask your attention to a conundrum touching that matter ? If yon write to a person in certain foreign countries, our Government will forward your letter without requiring you to prepay the postage; but if you write to a person in your own or aiieighboring State, you must not only prepay, but be sure you do not fall short a single penny; for if you do the Government will be afraid to risk collecting the penny at the other end, but will rush your letter to the Dead-Letter Office (at an expense of about two cents), and then write you (at an expense of three cents) that you can have it by writing for it (prepayment three cents) &2ld enclosing three cents for its transmission. To illustrate our system: A fortnight ago a citizen of Hartford mailed a letter, directed to me at this place where I am summering, and inadvertently fell one cent short of full prepayment. The postoffice authorities held a council of war over it, and then sent it to Washington in charge of an artillery regiment, at great cost to the Nation. The Dead-Letter Department worried over it several days and nights, and then wrote me (at a cost of three cents) that I could have my letter for a three cent stamp, or its equivalent in coin. I, like an ass, sent tot it, thinking it might contain a legacy, and yesterday it arrived in a man-of-war, at vast expense to the Government, an a was brought to these emises by three companies of marines and a mortar battery, all of whom staid to supper. The letter had nothing in it but a doctor’s bill. On the same day I received a heavy letter from England with a onepenny stamp on it and the words “ Collect eighteen pence.” It had been forwarded from Hartford without ever going to the Dead-Letter Office. The conundrum I wish to ask is this: If a letter be underprepaid, would it not be well to do it up m a rag and send it along, taking the risk of collecting the deficit at the other end, as used to be the custom before we learned so much ?

However, the expense which I (and the Government) incurred in the transmission of a doctor’s bill, which I did not want and do not value now that I have got it, was not the gravest feature of this unfortunate episode. The Postmaster-General was removed from the Cabinet for not collecting storage for the six days that my letter remained in the Dead-Letter Office. It seems to me that this punishment was conspicuously disproportioned to the offense. „ Mask Twain. Elxiba. N. Y., July 33,1876. [lt was characteristic of Mr. Twain’s kind heart that he prepaid the postage on the foregoing letter to ourselves with stamps amounting to thirty-nine cents, when three cents would doubtless have answered every purpose.— Eds. Evening Post.]