|NO one denies that the postal card is a great thing, and yet it makes
most people mad to get one This is because we naturally feel sensitive
about having our correspondence open to the eye of the postmaster and
postal clerk. Yet they do not read them. Postal employés hate a postal
card as cordially as anyone else. If they were banished and had nothing
to read but a package of postal cards, or a foreign book of statistics,
they would read the statistics. This wild hunger for postal cards on the
part of postmasters is all a myth. When the writer don't care who sees
his message, that knocks the curiosity out of those who handle those
messages. A man who would read a postal card without being compelled to
by some stringent statute, must be a little deranged. When you receive
one, you say, "Here's a message of so little importance that the writer
didn't care who saw it. I don't care much for it, myself." Then
you look it over and lay it away and forget it. Do you think that the
postmaster is going to wear out his young life in devouring literature
that the sendee don't feel proud of when he receives it? Hay, nay.
During our official experience we have been placed where we could have
read postal cards time and again, and no one but the All-seeing Eye
would have detected it; but we have controlled ourself and closed
our eyes to the written message, refusing to take advantage of the
confidence reposed in us by our government, and those who thus trusted
us with their secrets. All over our great land every moment of the day
or night these little cards are being silently scattered, breathing
loving words inscribed with a hard lead pencil, and shedding information
upon sundered hearts, and they are as safe as though they had never been
breathed.
They are safer, in most instances, because they cannot be read by
anybody in the whole world.
That is why it irritates us to have some one open up a conversation by
saying, "You remember what that fellow wrote me from Cheyenne on that
postal card of the 25th, and how he rounded me up for not sending
him those goods?" Now we can't keep all those things in our head. It
requires too much of a strain to do it on the salary we receive. A man
with a very large salary and a tenacious memory might keep run of the
postal correspondence in a small office, but we cannot do it. We are not
accustomed to it, and it rattles and excites us.