The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they wantLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Democracy; United States -- Politics and government
An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about
how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was
placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would
save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for
them.
This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of
what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million
people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit
himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being
suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over
that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it.
Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception
of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so
far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in
thinking what other people's conceptions of him are.
I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I
want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would
agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have
it, please, deliver our letters for us.
If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last
minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday
night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the
compositor's hands on Thursday morning--should take as has happened
before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its
special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one
suppose I would do?
Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another
column on Mr. Burleson.
But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the _Post_ are
both going to get out of that extra column.
I am going to do what I have done over and over before.
Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock
Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next
morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery,
I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six
o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar
ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a
seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for
the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the
morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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