In one respect the American officials are vastly ahead of us. They too have apparently suffered much from the applicants for information who are ignorant of the very elements of postal business. It has therefore occurred to the officials that systematic instruction might be given to the public on postal subjects. Here is the official order to postmasters: “Postmasters are hereby directed to confer with their local school authorities with the view of adopting the most effective method of instructing school-children as to the organisation and operations of the postal service. These instructions should cover such features of the service as the delivery of the mails, the classification of mail matter, the registry and money order systems, and particularly the proper addressing of letters and the importance of placing return cards or envelopes. Postmasters should arrange if possible to deliver personal talks to the pupils on these subjects, and should give teachers access to the Postal Guide and Postal Laws and Regulations, and render them every assistance in securing necessary information.” Instead of being treated as a joke, as a similar order might have been in this country, numerous letters were at once received by the United States Post Office from postmasters and school-boards all over the country indicating the liveliest interest in the subject. This is a chance for a British Postmaster-General to save his successors much unnecessary and trying correspondence, by adopting a similar policy. The rural delivery of letters in the United States was during many recent years in a very backward state, but considerable advances have lately taken place. The fetching of letters from the post office was the practice in places with even a large population. A writer in the _Paris Messenger_ not long ago was very indignant at the claims made by an official of the American Government, “that the American postal system was the best in the world and the best managed.” The writer said he had made an examination of European postal systems recently, and this was about as impudent a pronouncement as can well be imagined. America possesses no Postal Savings Bank, no Postal Telegraph system (in many Western States it costs three francs to send a dozen words a hundred miles over the monopolist private wires), there is no system of Parcel Post such as exists in England, and until recently there was no rural delivery. To see a long line of citizens, even in towns of five and six thousand inhabitants, waiting outside the post office for their morning mail, was as curious a sight for a European as could be imagined. I should add that the writer was an American. The report of the United States Postmaster-General is frequently a more plain-spoken and colloquial document than the purely business statement which the British Postmaster-General issues annually. This is only to be expected. Other officials in the United States have the same breezy style.