Shake-ups which do not retire incompetent or “faulted” public officials and servants, just as a “faulted” casting is rejected at “milling,” is not a “shake-up” that will stand good in any strata of human intelligence above that found in asylums for broken-down cerebral equipment. It is _betterments_, not “shake-ups,” that are needed.
The reader will please understand that there is no personal animus in what I here--or elsewhere--write. I have not had the pleasure, and possibly the honor, of personal acquaintance with Mr. Ingalls, Mr. Grant and others of the “round dozen” involved in the Postmaster General’s “shake-up.” They are probably all fine gentlemen personally, whom it would be a privilege to meet and to know. But we are writing to a subject _infinitely larger than any man or set of men_.
The people of this country are “up against” a _postal service proposition_--a proposition so stupendous in import, so far-reaching in its application, so crucial in its effects upon us and the children who follow us, and involving service so incompetent, so wasteful, so _corrupt_ in its management and operation as to have appalled those of us who have watched and studied its practices, and to have become a joke, provoking a smile or laugh among postal officials of other nations who render a service that _serves_.
For upward of forty years--a few bright spots excepted--our Postoffice Department has shown itself not only incompetent in the matter of business management, but disregardful in serving the people who _pay for the service_. I am aware this is a bald statement, a “mere assertion,” some postoffice official or sinecure postal “servant” may say, but it will have to be said more often, more carefully and studiedly and far more _eloquently_, in order to have it believed outside the family circle than it ever has heretofore been said to get the people of this country to stand for it.
In the “write-up” annexed to Postmaster General Hitchcock’s few paragraphs of interview, the “space” artist gives us, in epitome, the biography of the men Mr. Hitchcock promotes and demotes in that “round dozen” of changes. Some of my readers may have scanned the “booster” newspaper stuff of which I am writing. If so, much of what I have here said may be bricks or straw, just as it may happen that they know or do not know the true “innards” of the service status of this Postoffice Department of ours. I will not do more here than to point to the epitome biographical sketches of the promotes and demotes in the friendly “write-up.”