The Press
It has identified itself with, and forms one of the main features of, our great republic. Its very liberty is essential to the nature of a free state. Its complicity and power claim for it a consideration which no other department of literature and science, however popular, can attain. The press of our country is now the medium, if not, in fact, the very source, of that knowledge of which as a nation we are so justly proud.
The work of the post-office is of such a nature, changing its character with every new incumbent, that it is utterly impossible to reduce it to a system of permanent order during one term of office. Move, however, it must, right or wrong: hence it is that some portion of its machinery may get out of order and thus militate against the probability of reaching perfection. Perfection! and who seeks perfection in any of the institutions established by man? Nature alone “is perfect indeed.” It was so from the beginning, not only in its elements and principles, but in its members and its organs.
“The post-office,” says a writer in “Fraser’s Magazine” for September 2, 1862, “no longer assumes to be perfect, and its conductors have renounced their claims to infallibility. Suggested improvements, if they can sustain the indispensable test of rigid scrutiny, are welcomed, and not, as of old, frowned away. The department acts under the conviction that to thrive it must discard the confidence heretofore placed in legal prohibitions, and seek its continuance of prosperity only by deserving it.”
The English post-office has far better opportunities of rendering its system more perfect than it is, from the fact that its clerks are not discharged on every change made in the heads of the department by the government. They are fixtures. But in this country no one engaged in a public office under one administration can calculate being continued under another.
A clerk in the post-office, being appointed for an especial duty, troubles himself very little about that of any other. He takes no interest in the general business or details of the office, from the fact that his situation is not a permanent one: hence it is that few postmasters are enabled, within four years, to bring the office out of the chaos into which a previous administration had reduced it, so as to congratulate himself upon making one step towards perfection. He has to study the political elements outside first, and by the time these are reconciled, nearly one-third of his term has expired. In another portion of this work we have alluded to this political clog placed against the wheels of the postal department, and retarding, if not materially impairing, its social, moral, and financial interests.