US Postage: Has the mail come yet?

In most homes, that phrase is heard regularly by people everywhere who have depended on the U.S. Postal Service for the past 250 years.

The U.S. Postal Service was formed to keep lines of communication open between friends and relatives; to conduct business of all kinds; to order, send and receive merchandise; and to receive and send information.

Without a dependable method of communication, our nation would have withered on the vine. In those early years, communication was slow over long distances.

Some planters arranged for travelers to carry dispatches between plantations.

The British built postal roads and began postal services early in the 17th century.

In 1672, New York started a postal service with other colonies following suit. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin was made postmaster in Philadelphia. By the Revolutionary War, there were some 1,300 miles of roads and 453 postal stations with mail carried by horse, stage coach and sailing packets.

Deliverance of postage sped up when the railroads carried it. There were also telegrams and telephones. Cars, trucks and airplanes made deliveries faster.

There were sorting devices, all speeding up and improving the service. The service improved over the years, with mail arriving faster and more dependably.

During those years, we depended on the U.S. Postal Service as the one government service on which we could always depend and trust.

We saw our freedoms being eroded, but at least we could depend on our mail being delivered in a timely and dependable manner.

Now the government plans to cut the postal service.

They say the postal service is running in the red because people are using email. It doesn’t make good sense to cut back on services if it takes fewer people to do the job.