The Mail is Broken in Seattle

The mail service in Washington Territory at this time is simply wretched. On the most important mail route in the territory, to and from Seattle, there is a delay which works hardship in every way. Mail arrives in the morning which creates much extra labor in the local post office and delays deliveries from one to four hours. On the other hand, mails departing must be in the post office in sufficient time for 'work up' before the trains start. This, in the case of morning newspaper mails, is a certain requirement and an entirely unnecessary one under a proper and efficient system. For months past, the citizens of Seattle, Spokane mails, and a few other places have been compelled to support, by popular contribution, extra clerks in the local post office to secure even a fairly efficient service. But it is not alone in the leading cities that the service is bad. All over the country there is delay or positive neglect. It takes three days to send a letter from Pasco Junction to Walla Walla, less than fifty miles by rail, with daily trains. It takes longer to send a letter from Seattle to Kalama, less than one hundred miles, by a route of general daily travel, than from San Francisco to the same place, nearly one thousand miles. And so all over the territory the mail service is so bad as to be a constant source of irritation and damage. A city of twenty thousand people is served by a post office whose working capacity is adapted to less than half that number. The fault lies with the general administration of the postal department. The officials at Washington have no knowledge of the country, no conception of its necessities and are too narrow and too ignorant to learn.