14. The sorting of the French Mail is too often carried on under difficulties caused by the pertinacity of intruders, persons who, after having amused themselves by persistently knocking at every available window (where of course they receive no attention) drift round the premises in search of any unguarded door where an entrance may be effected. Even a Post Office must have some communication with the outer world, and if any approach, however unlikely, be left unbarred, these people will find it. In general they only want to ask "when the mail will be ready?" or some equally foolish question, the answer to which, if there is an answer, is already on the notice board. That the public service is hindered by the attempt to gratify this sort of curiosity or selfishness appears to be nothing to the intruder, who turns up with the greatest regularity whenever the windows are closed, even for a few moments, for either an incoming or an outgoing mail. Even at midnight he seems to think the Post Office is open for the sole purpose of answering his questions. Of the two, the intruder is a greater nuisance than the gentleman who is "very amiable to have a collection of timber posts" *
15. No less than $27,000 has been paid away to Chinese on Money Orders from Australia. The Chinese in Rangoon have also discovered the money system we maintain with the Indian Post Office, and are beginning to remit considerable sums. It is curious that the large Chinese population of the Straits Settlements use the Money Order system scarcely at all. The reason probably is that the intimate business connection between the Chinese communities of the two Colonies enables them to make arrangements of their own for remitting money, and that for some reason these arrangements cannot so easily be made in the cases of British Burmah and Australia.
16. Proposals to establish a Money Order system have been addressed to the Post Office of the United States, more with a view to the convenience of American residents in Southern China than to the exchange of Chinese remittances. If the Chinese who have crossed the Pacific avail themselves of the system as their countrymen in Australia have done, more assistance in the Money Order branch of this Department will become unavoidably necessary, but this result is not expected.
17. Now that an inland Parcel Post has been established in the United Kingdom it is to be hoped that the much and long desired Parcel Post from China may be established. Proposals to effect this have been submitted to the London Office. This Department has always declined to participate in any Parcel Post system on which prepayment will not frank the parcel to the door of the addressee. There will probably now be no difficulty in securing this.
18. Some points in the Post Office Ordinance 1876 needing amendment, an entire reprint has been submitted for re-enactment. The point on which an alteration of the law was especially desirable was the Section exempting all Chinese letters from the action of the Ordinance. No extensive or sweeping interference with Chinese correspondence is intended, but it is desirable to have the power to stop those wholesale evasions of public dues of all kinds which Chinese are so ingenious in devising. On one steamer for San Francisco alone over 11,000 letters were found surreptitiously conveyed in the baggage and about the persons of Chinese passengers.†
19. The amount of thought Chinese will bestow on petty frauds of this kind, and the patience with which they will "compass sea and land" to carry them out are well illustrated by a system which they worked between Singapore and Swatow. Chinese letters for Swatow were posted at Singapore without any attempt at prepayment. At Swatow they were of course charged double postage. But they had been folded with the ends open, and when the addressee had read the contents he declined to receive the letters or pay the sums due. The Swatow Agency met this neat little fraud by enclosing the letters in envelopes, and the practice was discontinued at once.
The same thing was once tried from home with short-paid post cards, and defeated in a similar manner. It will perhaps hardly be believed that there are persons in China who advise their friends at home not to prepay their letters, as the postage is charged here not to the addressees but to their employers! The delay which this Department has purposely introduced as an extra penalty on short-paid correspondence has greatly tended to discourage this. Every unpaid letter retards the delivery of the mail in which it is. A system of universal compulsory prepayment is much to be desired.
20. The rule of refusing to make enquiries for unregistered letters said to have contained bank notes, jewellery, &c., and alleged to be lost in passing through the Post, introduced more than a year ago, would seem to have worked well. Complaints have become infrequent. It will be said that people do not complain when they are told beforehand they will not be listened to. That is true, but also,
* Sic, literally, in a letter from a timbrophile. What he meant to say was that he was very desirous of forming a collection of timbres poste.
Further seizures were as follows:—
City of Peking, 2,359 letters. Arabic.......................................... 2,457
Oceanic, ...... ...14,311 †
More than 25,000 of these letters have been received back from San Francisco as unclaimed,