The Portland Daily Press

A Grievous Evil and its Remedy.

We invite the attention of many of our city subscribers, whose papers are left on Commercial and other business streets, to an evil which bears heavily on us, but which they can remedy at a very trifling expense. Our carriers must be out by five o'clock in the morning in order to make their rounds in season. They go upon Commercial street, for example, before the places of business are opened, and very few of the shops and stores are provided with places in which papers can safely be deposited. If the papers are put in the door handles or laid upon the thresholds, they afford a tempting opportunity for the gratification of newspaper thieves, who are around earlier than the business places are opened. Some mornings it has cost us a dollar or more to supply papers where we have every reason to believe they had been promptly and faithfully delivered, but subsequently stolen. It is a burden that we ought not to bear.

In many places parties desire to have their papers put under the doors. Do they consider that a boy cannot well put a paper under, so that a rogue may not extract it, unless he consumes more time than consists with a speedy delivery of his route? Ten seconds delay each on three hundred papers, will amount to nearly an hour, and it is a smart boy who can tuck a paper through the narrow space under a door without a delay of more than ten seconds. More than this: when the weather is sharp and frosty it is no pleasant job for the little fellows, with their numb fingers, to do such work; and then in winter when snow has fallen, it is a severe thing to require them to brush it away or thrust their bare hands into the cold deposit.

What is to be done, then? We ask, entreat our friends, to have places made in their doors for the paper to be put through. It is not necessary to make a box upon the inside but simply cut a slot in the door, four inches long and half an inch wide, and when put through the paper will be safe. Will they do it, or, by neglect will they require us to lose more every morning in supplying duplicate copies, than the entire profits on all the papers delivered upon their streets? A quarter of a dollar will pay the expense of a neat arrangement for almost any shop door in the city. Who will commence the good work, and report to us so we can inform the carriers accordingly?