“In places where a weekly mail would have answered, a daily, semi-weekly, or tri-weekly mail was run, and so where a place of somewhat more consequence needed a semi-weekly mail a daily mail would be run. Instead of making every post-office a paying one, by making it the depot for a sufficient population, swarms of unnecessary offices were created to gratify local politicians, the effect of which was that none were remunerative. We are sorry to say that this evil afflicts the service in many parts of the North, and that there is great need of discontinuing offices now in existence. Sometimes the ambition or the jealousy of villages led to this multiplication of useless offices, but generally it was caused by the Congressmen catering for their political supporters. Since the year 1860 the necessities of the government have compelled the department to reduce both the number of these offices and of the mails run. The deficiency always visible in the postal revenues at the South, aside from the causes we have referred to, arose also from the evil policy of the slaveholding oligarchy. Four millions of the Southern population were prohibited from a knowledge of reading and writing, and of course the post-office was not needed for them. The planter had no right to complain of being reduced to a weekly mail; for in a region of six square miles there might not be more than three families using the post-office, the rest being all slaves, or illiterate ‘poor white trash.’ “Yet these planters would make a vast deal of fuss about their mail facilities, and to satisfy them the National Government sustained an annual loss of millions of dollars. It was not only the prohibition of letters toward the slaves that caused the loss, for the poor whites labored under no such prohibition, and yet were as ignorant as the slaves; but it was the total absence of all provision for the education of the masses of the population throughout the South. The poor whites could not read newspapers if they received them; they could not write letters, nor could they read them. Moreover, the mail-matter was still further reduced by the refusal to allow anti-slavery newspapers to circulate at all in the South. A merchant could not receive the commercial papers of the North, because of their sentiments about slavery; a clergyman could not receive the religious papers of the North, for the same reason. If a man in any of the interior districts received frequent letters from the North, he would be sure to find them a matter of inquisitorial questioning, and would be obliged to give an idea of the nature of his correspondence. “The question how the postal service can be rendered permanently remunerative at the South involves three distinct and very important considerations:—