Recent improvement on the postal laws.
Several material changes and improvements in the postal service have been authorized by an act of the late Congress, establishing certain post routes. The second section of the act empowers the Postmaster General to procure and furnish letter sheets, with postage stamps impressed thereon, combining in one both a sheet and an envelope. This supplies a desideratum in certain business and legal proceedings where it is important to prove the date of mailing of a letter by the postmark. With the common envelope this is always difficult, and frequently impossible, on account of the letter being separate from the cover on which the postmark is impressed.To newspaper publishers, and their customers in the interior, the most important section is that which makes it "lawful for persons known as regular dealers in newspapers and periodicals, to receive by mail such quantities of either as they may require, and to pay the postage hereon as they may be received, at the same rates as regular subscribers to such publications." This is intended to give the benefit of the reduced quarterly rates to newspaper dealers, who, on account of the irregularity in the number of papers and periodicals they order, find it impossible to pay postage quarterly, in advance. It is a very liberal provision, both to them and their customers.
Two other sections enlarge the scope of mailable matter, to be paid for according to the weight of the package, by including maps, engravings, lithographs, or photographic prints on rollers or in paper covers, books, bound or unbound; phonographic paper and letter envelopes; all of which are to be rated at one cent an ounce for any place within the United States not over fifteen hundred miles, and two cents an ounce for any distance over fifteen hundred miles, prepaid by postage stamps. The packages must not exceed four pounds. Cards, blank or printed, in packages weighing at least eight ounces, and seeds or cuttings, in packages not exceeding eight ounces, are made mailable matter at the same rates, prepared in the same way.
By the fourteenth section of the act to which we are referring, we notice that some letters by the overland routes to the Pacific, which have heretofore been rated at three cents per half ounce, when the distance was under three thousand miles, are now to be rated ten cents. The law will hereafter be that the ten cent rate of postage is to be prepaid on all letters conveyed in the mail between any points in the United States east of the Rocky Mountain, and any State or Territory on the Pacific.
