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"The celerity of the mail should always be equal to the most rapid transition of the traveler..."

So the Postal Service has encouraged and utilized the stage coach, the railroad, the steamboat, the pony express, the telegraph, and finally the airplane, for
"...that which shortens the time of communication, and facilitates the intercourse between distant places, is like bringing them nearer together. While it affords convenience to men of business, it tends to counteract local prejudices, by enlarging the sphere of acquaintance.  It perpetuates existing friendships, and creates new ones, by which the bonds of union are strengthened, and the happiness of society is promoted."
  The third principle originated in our Revolution. Under British domination the Postal Service had been used as a means of profit making and taxation for the purposes of the Crown. The Colonists resorted to bootlegging the mails.  The Continental Congress, among its first acts, created an American service, and when it was provided that any excess of postage over expenses should be employed to expand the service the use of the Postal Service as a money-making device was one and for all abandoned.  An effort, in the first draft of the Articles of Confederation, to leave a way open for using the Postal Service as a means of taxation was squelched, and when a similar effort was made in the Constitutional Convention it was rejected even more summarily. The persistent emphasis upon service finally led the Congress, in 1851, to go further and abandon the effort, theretofore made, to keep the costs always within postal revenues; it was recognized that if, to give to our nation the benefits of speed and security in mail transmission and in commerce, it was necessary to exceed postal revenues, the needs of our people would come first. When the Constitution of the Confederacy sought to modify this principle by proclaiming that the postal establishment should be self-sustaining President Davis was forced to inquire of the Confederate Congress, before the effective date of this limitation, whether the clause did not mean self-sustaining as near as may be, for otherwise, he said, the postal establishment could not function.
 The penny-wise policy which the Confederacy attempted to pursue had been shown by bitter experience to be pound-foolish.  Efforts in our early history always to keep the service and each of its branches within the postal revenues, rather than to maintain at all times the best of service available to everyone, had proved
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[[footnote]]
1 Report of Postmaster General W.T. Barry
November 29, 1834
2 Kelly, op. cit., pp. 1-19
3 Id., p. 21
4 Id., p. 29
5 Id., p. 35
6 Id., pp. 60-64.
7 Id., p. 65
8 I. Richardson, Confederate Messages and Papers, p. 252 (1905).
[[/footnote]]

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