to that here proposed. To this recommendation it has been objected by the Post-master General, that "the receivers are tradesmen, and any operation with the letters in an open shop, beyond the mere transfer from the receiving-box to the bag, must be highly objectionable, even if it tended to forward the business at the General Post Office; but any attempt at such assortment, with nearly 700 post towns classed in 24 divisions, would lead to extensive confusion, and would retard instead of expediting the delivery."[1] But the objection here stated does not appear applicable to the plan which I have proposed; under that plan the letters would be merely transferred from the receiving boxes to the bag.
The present mode of procedure is, for the letters to be taken to the Central Office unassorted: at the Central Office they are first assorted into twenty-four divisions, each division corresponding to a line of road,—that is, all letters which go by the same mail-coach are put into a heap, and these heaps are then subdivided, so as to bring all letters for the same post-town together.
It appears, then, that a preparatory assortment of letters into twenty-four divisions is common to both the existing and the proposed arrangement. The preparatory alphabetic assortment, however, possesses two decided advantages over the other; first, it is made before the receiving-houses close; secondly, it is much more easily effected, and consequently much more rapidly and accurately done: for it requires no knowledge of the mechanism to be afterwards employed for the distribution of letters, but merely the power of deciding quickly whether a certain place is a post-town or not, a fact which the receiver may always ascertain by consulting an alphabetic list, and such a list is frequently consulted at present to ascertain the rate of postage; or, as the number of letters which present any difficulty must always be small, he may put them apart for assortment at the Central Office, by those who have more experience than himself; while the preparatory assortment now practised requires a
- ↑ Parliamentary Return, 1835, No. 512, p. 6.
