Carson Daily Appeal

AMONG OUR QUESTIONS.

With which Congress will feel itself called upon to wrestle, is the postal, or rather, the postage question. By the most bunglesome of all botchwork, the laws relating to the mail fees of all printed matter are little less than barbarous. Nobody seems willing to father these preposterous provisions. They seem to have been born of a parentage one side of which was a spiteful sense against the busybodies of the press for raising the howl they did over the Franking privilege, and the other a precipitous and ill-considered rush in the supposed direction of retrenchment and reform in the Post Office Department. But we cannot help regarding the Postal cards with which the mails are flooded, as the greatest mistake, in a business sense, known to the Mail service. In the first place the card system is an absurdity. In the next place the cards are neither a letter nor a telegram—but a base and cheap evasion of the duties of epistolizing and a slow and fallacious imitation of a telegraphic message. In short they are an impertinence. But a third and more vital reason why they ought to be done away with is that they cause a loss of revenue to the Mail service. They do not at all satisfy the demand for cheap letter postage.

What should be done is to repeal the one cent postal card law and substitute therefor a fixing the rate of postage on all letters of single-letter weight, at two cents, all round.

We believe that such a provision as this would be a real service to the people and prove a substantial help to the deficient income of the Post Office Department.