Identifier: thirtyyearsinwa00loga (find matches)
Title: Thirty years in Washington; or, Life and scenes in our national capital. Portraying the wonderfuloperations in all the great departments, and describing every important function of our national go vernment ... With sketches of the presidents and their wives ... from Washington's to Roosevelt's administration
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Logan, Mary Simmerson (Cunningham), "Mrs. J. A. Logan,", 1838-1923
Subjects: Presidents Executive departments
Publisher: Hartford, Conn., A.D. Worthington & co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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and again cuts it in two, so that each is nowdivided into the regulation size of one hundred stampseach. These are tied into packages ready for delivery tothe Post-Office Department, which pays the Bureau of En-graving and Printing five cents a thousand for the stamps. With one of these 4,000,000,000 of stamps placed onyour sealed envelope, your letter is entitled to a safe journeywhatever its destination. With the marvelous enterprisewhich has extended the advantages of the post-office inevery direction, you will not have far to go to start yourletter on its journey. The department furnishes to post-masters all necessary canceling stamps and inks; it alsofurnishes the twine with which to tie up the letters inassorted bundles; and the amount used may be judged fromthe fact that, buying at wholesale prices, the governmentpays about $100,000 a year for enough to go around. In the large cities each post-office is provided with anelaborate arrangement of boxes all labeled so that mail for
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TRAVELING POST-OFFICES. 321 any place for miles around finds its appropriate pigeon-hole,and mail for each of the railway routes is similarly sorted.The railway postal service is the artery of the whole sys-tem, and though it has been in operation less than fortyyears it now covers over 200,000 miles. When the mail ofthe country became so great that the delay in sorting itin city and town offices became an important item in theeconomy of time, this system of traveling post-offices wasdevised, and now Uncle Sam has about 4,000 such cars forhis exclusive use. Usually a run is planned to occupy a day,and two sets of men are employed, one for the day serviceand one for the night. At the end of such a run the caris taken by a new set for another run of twenty-four hours.The New York and Chicago section, for example, willbe divided into three runs. The twenty men who start outfrom New York assort the mail all the way to Syracuse,where a new set of twenty takes charge of it as far asClevelan

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