Postmaster-General Cresswell said in 1872: "If the effects of rivalry between the telegraph and the mail upon the revenues of the post office have not been serious, it is due alone to the liberal management of the latter as compared with that of the companies, a management which since the invention of the telegraph has reduced the rates of postage from 25 to 3 cents, and increased tenfold the correspondence of the country" (Rep. 1872, pp. 22-3). One of Hannibal Hamlin's three great reasons for a postal telegraph was "for the sake of the post-office system, which may at any time be depleted by a strong telegraph in private hands" (_Cong. Globe_, 42-2, p. 3554). In times of pestilence the telegraph will save the post office from embargo. A letter from Port Gibson, Miss., says: Whenever the yellow fever breaks out at any point, all cities and towns, and some counties, having communication with the infected districts, at once declare a rigid quarantine. The effect of this is to cut off all communication between themselves and the outside world. Trains and boats are prevented from receiving or delivering the mails. Business men are unable to communicate by letter with their correspondents, and all are prevented from hearing from relatives and friends in the quarantined places, except by telegraph, whose rates prevent many from using the wires.[5] [5] Wan. Arg. p. 138. The infection does not travel on an electric wire, and if the post office possessed the telegraph, its business would go smoothly on in spite of the plague, instead of being brought to a dead standstill throughout the region of disaster at the very time when hearts are breaking for daily news, and communication is of the utmost importance to alleviate the quarantine. 11. _Employees will be benefited_ by passing from a régime of oppression to one of elevation; from low wages[6] and long hours to high wages and short hours; from a service almost hopeless of promotion to a service of almost limitless possibilities to the man of character, brain, and energy; from an employment in which they are regarded as so much machinery to be obtained at the lowest market rates and worked for all the profit there is in them to an employment in which their comfort and advancement are among the main objects of solicitude with the management; from a business in which they have no share to a business in which they are equal partners with all their fellow-citizens; from serfdom to liberty and manhood. No more boycotting and black-listing, no more denial of the rights of organization and petition.