The French Post Office also supplies card money orders payable not at a post office, but at the payee's address. The Spanish Post Office is trying. Spain is a thinly populated country, with comparatively few large towns, and if you travel off the beaten track you will meet all kinds of inconveniences. A Spanish post office is usually superior to so petty a trade as the sale of stamps: you obtain these at the shops. Moreover, though other postal business is transacted at the Post Office, there are certain hours set apart for different kinds of business. A Spanish post office may be open from nine until ten for the registration of letters, from ten until eleven for the sale of postal orders, from eleven until noon for the payment of postal orders, and so on. This is the Spaniard's idea of simplifying business, not only for the public, but the official. The Spanish postal official is often a poorly paid and rather badly used individual. The postmaster of a large town in the Canary Islands confessed to a friend of mine, who was postmaster of a big city in the United Kingdom, that his salary was less than a third of the Englishman's. And he added, “I don't even get that as a rule unless I go to Madrid for it.” A visitor to Grand Canary on asking for a postcard was informed that there had been none in the island for three months. The postmaster had applied to Madrid for a supply but in vain. He was probably expected to fetch his stores as well as his salary. The Spaniard, at any rate, is modest about his Post Office: he does not increase your annoyance by claiming perfection. He is one of the oldest members of the Old World, and he has not learnt the art of self-advertisement. But cross the Atlantic, visit the United States, and before you have time to experience any of the inconveniences of the postal service, you will be told it is the smartest in the world. It is not only the man in the street who makes this claim; the Postmaster-General does it frequently in his Annual Report. Here is the conclusion of one Annual Report: it is the Postmaster-General's peroration: “It is therefore not too much to state that in most of the more important relations of the Postal Service, as shown by the statistics, the United States leads the world.” It is not too much to say of this outburst that if the British Postmaster-General were to say this of his Post Office in his Annual Report, a reduction in his salary would be at once moved in the House of Commons, and it would probably be carried by the combined votes of Imperialists and Little Englanders. Owing partly to the language used by postal reformers there is an idea prevalent in parliamentary circles that the British Post Office is behind the times.