Page:The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago.djvu/127

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
FOREIGN AND COLONIAL LETTERS.
59

trict, delay the delivery but little, as the time of the Letter Carrier is occupied chiefly in walking from house to house.

The proposed arrangements should in each case be submitted to the approval of the central authority, (the Post-master General or Commissioners,) whom it might perhaps be necessary to empower to make arrangements for secondary distribution in any instance in which the local authority declined or neglected to act.

If this plan were adopted, the central authority of the Post Office would be relieved of nearly all care with respect to the secondary distribution of letters; the frequency, and, consequently, the expense of which would in each instance be regulated in exact accordance with the wants of the district.

Foreign and Colonial Letters.—For the sake of simplicity in accounting for the postage, it is very desirable that the Foreign and Colonial letters should be subjected to as nearly as practicable the same regulations as Inland letters.

As it will probably be impossible in all cases to provide for the English postage on letters received from foreign countries being paid in advance, some peculiar arrangement with reference to foreign letters appears to be required. The mode of dealing with them, which suggests itself to my mind, is the following:

Let all foreign letters on leaving this country be subjected to a double rate of English postage, but let foreign letters received into this country be