A Whoop For Humanity
A Whoop for Humanity.
A communication in the Times of Wednesday, signed this, "***," sets forth that the writer while digesting his cigar that morning, had his heart wrung at both valves at the cruel sight of a carrier loaded up with a pack of mail which rested so heavily upon his stomach that to balance it--the pack, not the stomach--the owner of it--the stomach, not the pack--was obliged to hump his spine backward, while the strap of the mail pouch "cut its way into his coat, from the weight of his burden." This the writer feels is uncivil civil service, and inhuman as well, although acknowledging that the unrighteous load was due to Christmas presents coming by mail. The writer will give $5 toward a set of carrier mail carts, and wants a subscription list opened for the purpose. We would say to the man with the starry name, don't you do it. The civil service knows its business. Every one of those carriers, before they began carrying the mail had curvature of the spine, which rounded up the southern terminus of the backbone in the shape of the letter J. This is being now cured by the stomach pack. Each, also, at the beginning of his term had dyspepsia, heart-burn, paucity of the gastric juices, white clover "slobbers," stricture of the alimentary viaduct, and chronic numb puck, the worst way. That is all gone now, and there is not one of them, but if he were unharnessed and turned loose at a church social would easily devour all three oysters in the soup. It gives a man an appetite to carry the mail. It hardens his muscles, reinforces the calcareous deposit in his vertabrae, adds dignity to his bearing, and gives his countenance a glow of self-deficiency and excommunicated knowledge.
As to the strap of his mail pouch cutting into his coat--if a carrier can't stand that, he is no patriot, but a man with soul so dead that he had rather live on his country than die for it. Let him remember that the individual is nothing, the state everything, and wear his pack with an exhaled demeanor and christian fortitude. If the cords cut through to his skeleton, let him grin and bear it, and remember that "no affliction seemeth at present joyous, but grievous," and look forward to pay day, and bear forth with the majesty of an U. S. official his burden of Christmas toys, dunning letters, etc., etc., conscious that when duty and salary call, "he wears his honors poorly in a box who hugs his kicky-wicky at home."
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Old News
Ann Arbor Argus