The plan proposed for the collection and delivery of telegrams by
letter-carriers is equally impracticable. The rapid and safe delivery of
messages is the great difficulty with which the telegraph companies have
to contend, and the amount paid for this service forms a very material
portion of the expense attending the operation of the system. How would
this service be performed if left to the Post-Office Department? In
1865—the last year containing the statistics of the number of letters
sent through the United States mail—the Postmaster-General estimates the
number of letters transmitted at 467,591,600. No statement of the total
number of letters delivered by carrier in the United States is given in
the Postmaster-General’s reports for 1865 or 1866, but he states that
the number of cities at which free delivery is established is 46, and
the total number of carriers, 863; that 582 carriers are attached to ten
offices, from which are delivered 38,060,009 letters. If the remaining
281 carriers, who are distributed among 36 offices, deliver as many in
proportion, we have a total of 56,446,004 letters delivered for the
year, or about nine per cent of the whole number transmitted through the
mail. This does not present a very flattering result, and does not argue
very favorably for the satisfactory delivery of thirteen millions of
telegrams, through the same channel, at over 4,000 offices!
Compare with these meagre results the operations of the British
Post-Office, which employs 11,449 carriers, and annually delivers
705,000,000 letters.
As for the collection of telegrams from street boxes, the very idea is
in direct antagonism to the first principles of telegraphic
communication. A street box may answer the purpose of a place of deposit
for a letter intended for the next day’s mail, but those who desire to
communicate by telegraph want immediate and speedy communication. They
require their message conveyed, and very frequently answered, whilst
they wait in the telegraph office. They have no idea of depositing their
messages to await the diurnal collection from the street box. Indeed,
the idea is too absurd to be seriously discussed. There are upwards of
100 telegraph offices in the city of New York alone, and a proportionate
number of branch offices in all the cities. Is it probable that persons
who wish to send a despatch will walk several miles to send it by
government line rather than patronize private lines at their own doors?
We cannot think that a department whose expenses exceed its receipts by
$6,437,991.85 in a single year; which cannot even _guess within a
hundred millions_ of the number of letters it transmits per annum; which
provides only forty-six free delivery offices out of a total of 29,387
post-offices in the United States; which does not even pretend to give
the number of letters delivered free for any one year; and which sends
over 4,500,000 letters to the Dead-Letter Office per annum, is a very
proper guardian of so important an interest as the Electric Telegraph.
The space occupied for the various telegraph offices in all the
principal cities of the United States is considerably greater than that
required by the post-offices, while the rent paid by our company, owing
to the more central and eligible situations of our offices, is greatly
in excess of that paid by the Post-Office Department. In New York, our
company pays $40,000 per annum for rent of its central office alone. So
far as space and eligibility of location is concerned, we could much
better accommodate the public by the delivery of their letters at our
numerous offices, than they are now accommodated at the remote and
inconvenient places provided for them by the government, and in all
respects we could much better handle the mails than the post-office, as
now located and generally conducted, could manage the telegraph.