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Show GETTING LETTERS CLANDESTINELY. The posloffice department has started out to regulate the morals mor-als of those who receive their mail through the general delivery. According to an exchange, a ruling of the department requires that persons who have known addresses and boxes in the postoffices must not get mail also at the general delivery windows. The reason for this order is that the handling of mail in that double capacity tends to foster immorality, illicit correspondence, and lawless appointments. ap-pointments. It is stated that both meu and women of all ages have been using this general delivery apart from their home addresses or from the family postoffico box as a means of carrying on flirtations and making immoral assignations. And yet this double postoffice delivery may continue if the persons affected can convince the postmaster post-master that everything is all right in their correspondence ; that is, presumably, if the person challenged can show to the postmaster that he is carrying on a correspondence with a young lady in the city clandestinely in this manner because his family does not approve of his intention to marry that young lady, or if the young lady can make a like representation with respect to some young man with whom she is in correspondence, the postmaster will deliver his fatherly fath-erly benediction upon the clandestine correspondence and allow it to continue. But if the postmaster is of the opinion that the correspondence corres-pondence thus inquired into is likely to lead to immoral results, or is in any way he is not satisfied with the explanation which those who wish to carry on tin's irregular correspondence make, then he will stop it. The postmaster is to be a busy-body, prying into private affairs in the name of morality. What is the object? Is it to make the bad good? If a man or woman has a mind filled with immorality which seeks a sympathetic mind through the mails, that man or woman cannot can-not be saved by a Peeping Tom in the postoffice or any other power except self-consciousness of wrong-doing and a desire to do better If the postoffice is closed to those who would clandestinely do wrong, then some other means of venting the immorality will be found. The good that might come from this order will be more than overbalanced by the liberty to pry into personal affairs which this ruling grants to postmasters. Home postmasters may not abuse the privilege, others will use it to the utmost, and out of the license to peep into the mails will come more deviltry than is now possible of perpetration through the general delivery window. Tf a young and unsophisticated girl were being misled by a clever rascal and the general delivery were being employed for that purpose, on complaint of those interested in the welfare of the girl, the exchange of letters might be stopped, but to attempt to regulate the morals of an older person of worldly knowledge, who with eyes wide open, persists in being worldly, is a waste of effort, unless it be in a persuasive appeal to the better self. |