Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

94 BRITAIN AT WORK. necessary to make special provision for this department of post office business. Electricity, indeed, plays a most important part over the whole building, and the only portion of the premises to which there is a supply of gas is the kitchen, where it is used for cooking purposes. Even in the heating of the wax used in sealing the mail bags electricity is brought into use. The town Photo: Cassell & Co., Ltd. A RURAL POSTMAN. wax is placed in small copper pans which rest on electrical hot plates. The undelivered postal packet is always a source of great distress to the Postmaster- General when he makes his annual report, and it would seem that either the British public is growing more careless or its faith in the omniscience of the Post Office is increasing. Take, for example, the case of Leeds, where in one year there were 31,990 letters which could neither be delivered to the addressees nor returned to the senders. In other large towns the figures are not less startling. Property of the value of ^680,000 was found in one year in letters opened in the Returned Letter Offices in the United Kingdom. Strangest of all phenomena in the statistics of human frailty is the fact that 345,690 packets have been posted during a period of twelve months without an address, and they actually contained cash and paper money to the value of nearly £7,500. 1 he statistics of the post office in a large like Liverpool are interesting. The population is about 700,000, and in one ordinary week there were deliv- ered in the district 1,724,938 letters; 716 postmen are employed in the dis- trict; and there are 447 town letter- boxes. Liverpool is an exceptionally busy post office centre, because of the foreign mails which are made up here. Those for West Africa have to be enclosed in waterproof bags, as at some places they are thrown overboard, and are washed ashore through the surf. The chief differences between Lon- don and a provincial town as far as the post office is concerned consist in the cross posts and rural district systems which are in existence in the big country offices. In the Liver- pool district there are five district and twelve sub-district offices, at which the postmen not only deliver and collect but stamp and primarily sort the letters they collect. A country postman in these districts is a man from whom much is expected. Before the year 1897 there were hundreds of places which had never boasted of a free delivery of letters. The inhabitants of many isolated rural districts had to make their own arrangements for getting their letters from the nearest town. But this is now altered, and the extension of rural posts is practically complete. The rural post office is in miniature what the big town office is, with the important ex- ception that the sorting is here reduced to a minimum. This sketch of the work of the Post Office in the British Isles would be incomplete without some reference to the mail routes to the Continent. By far the greater number of Continental mails go via Dover and Calais, and by this route goes every week, on Friday