Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 98, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1909 — GOVERNMENT MAIL ORDER BUSINESS WILL RESUME. [ARTICLE]

GOVERNMENT MAIL ORDER BUSINESS WILL RESUME.

When A. L. Lawshe Returns to Wash* ington Uncle Sam Will , Furnish Envelopes at Less Than Cost.

A. L. Lawshe, the third assistant postmaster-general, who was formerly an Indiana newspaper man, has bees spending the summer in New Mexico, where he has been trying to recover his somewhat broken health and he has written back to the breathless public that he will be able to return to his desk early in September. Lawsy, but the printers will rejoice when Lawshe gets back and again starts his government mail order house for printed envelopes. Lawshe forgot as soon as he became one of the directors of the postoffice machinery that he used to be engaged in business and had to work for a living, and he has devoted a great share of his time since he was appointed to office to building up a mail order business for envelopes, with a return card printed in the corner and having a U. S. stamp in the other. He has used the mails in every possible manner, franking his advertising indiscriminately and sending postmasters great batches of advertising with instructions to stick them in the box of every business man,* a means of securing business that is denied to every other business seeker, and which as applied to any business firm is strictly against the law. Lawshe informs the business man that the government will furnish printed and stamped envelopes at practically the cost of the envelope and the stamp, charging nothing for the printing and will frank the envel-

opes from Washington to any place in the United States, which would cost any individual or business firm entering into competition with Lawshe a prohibitory postal rate, and he keeps an office force and does sufficient advertising to make the government an actual loser on every job of envelopes that it prints. The country printer and the city printer meets this unfair, dishonest and contemptible competition that no other business in the land is subjected to, and to maintain it and this freak Lawshe the government loses many dollars each year.

The principle is the same precisely as it would be for the postoffice department to engage in the making of pants, send its advertising in bulk to the postmasters with instructions to place it in the postofflce boxes of all pants wearers, take their measure, make the pants at the cost of the goods, send them to the customer by mail without paying postage, and making no charge for the making. That is the Lawshe plan of competing with the printer.

The dispatch which Lawshe sends back about himself states that he had throat trouble resulting from the bursting of a blood vessel last spring, developing bronchial trouble. In his physical ailments Lawshe has our sincere sympathy, but we believe the postoffice deficit would be less if his services were dispensed with and a successor selected who would not engage in the mall order business.