A Single Postal Territory

Post a letter to another country and one stamp does it. The postal service where you are hands it to a service somewhere else, which delivers it, and nobody sends anybody an invoice.

That arrangement is a hundred and fifty one years old and it was written down in a fortnight.

What it replaced

Before it, moving a letter across a border meant a treaty. Not a general treaty: a specific bilateral agreement between two postal administrations, setting rates, dividing the money and specifying how the mail would be handed over. A letter crossing three countries depended on the arrangements each pair had made with the other, and often on the sender prepaying to a border and the recipient paying the rest.

You can see the wreckage of that system in the treaty that ended it, which contains a clause sweeping away "all the stipulations of the special treaties concluded between the various countries and Administrations" so far as they conflicted with the new text. There were enough of them to need clearing.

Bern, autumn 1874

The Swiss government convened an international postal congress at Bern, opening on 15 September 1874, with representatives of twenty two nations. The plan had been drawn up by Heinrich von Stephan, the postmaster general of the German Reichspost.

They signed on 9 October, three and a half weeks later. Ratifications were exchanged at Bern on 3 May 1875, and the treaty came into force on 1 July.

The signatories were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, Spain, the United States, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Roumania, Russia, Servia, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. It was concluded for three years, after which it would be considered indefinitely prolonged, with any party free to leave on a year's notice. It was renamed the Universal Postal Union in 1878 because the membership had outgrown the name. The signing date is now World Post Day.

The sentence

Article 1 does the work.

"The countries between which the present treaty is concluded shall form, under the title of General Postal Union, a single postal territory for the reciprocal exchange of correspondence between their post-offices."

Not a network of agreements between territories. One territory. Everything after that is detail, and the detail is unusually good.

The prices

The union rate was fixed at 25 centimes for a single prepaid letter, with each country free to charge more or less to suit its own coinage provided it stayed between 20 and 32. A single letter was anything up to 15 grammes, and heavier letters paid another rate for each further 15 grammes or part of one. An unpaid letter was charged at double the destination country's prepaid rate, which is a neat way of making prepayment the sensible option without forbidding anything.

Postcards had to be prepaid and cost half a letter. Printed matter, which the treaty defines at generous length as legal and commercial documents, samples, newspapers, stitched or bound books, pamphlets, music, visiting cards, catalogues, prospectuses, announcements and photographs, went at 7 centimes a packet, within a band of 5 to 11, for each 50 grammes. Samples could weigh 250 grammes and everything else a kilogram.

Sea carriage of more than 300 nautical miles could carry a surcharge, capped at half the ordinary rate. That is the only place where geography is allowed to affect the price at all.

The clause that makes it work

Here is the part worth admiring.

"Each Administration shall keep the whole of the sums which it collects by virtue of the foregoing Articles 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Consequently, there will be no necessity on this head for any accounts between the several Administrations of the Union."

The country where the letter is posted keeps the postage. The country that delivers it gets nothing for that letter, and gets to keep the postage on the letters posted with it. Nobody meters anything, nobody invoices anybody, nobody argues about whose train carried which sack.

There is one exception, and it is the sort of thing that tells you the drafters had thought about edge cases: an item that has travelled only within one country's own service and is then redirected abroad picks up the destination country's interior rate. Everything else is settled by not settling.

It works on a bet: that over a year the flows roughly balance, and that the cost of settling accounts between two dozen administrations exceeds whatever the imbalance amounts to. The bet was a good one for a long time, and the second half of it is the part that generalises. A great deal of administrative machinery exists to divide sums smaller than the machinery costs.

Two further clauses do quiet work. Official correspondence about the postal service itself is exempt from postage, and apart from that, the treaty says, no franking or reduction of postage is allowed at all. In an era when free postage was a privilege handed out to officials and their friends, that is a door being closed.

And then the protection for the person actually posting the letter: neither the sender nor the addressee may be called on to pay, in the country of origin or the country of destination, any tax or postal duty beyond the ones the treaty sets. No surcharges, no local levies, no arrival fees. What is on the stamp is what it costs.

The treaty was also careful about what it did not touch. It alters no country's internal postal law, and it explicitly preserves the right of members to keep or make closer arrangements among themselves for the progressive improvement of postal relations. It set a floor rather than a ceiling, which is probably why nobody left.

The treaty also guarantees what it calls the right of transit "throughout the entire territory of the Union", with full liberty for any administration to send closed mails through intermediate countries. Your letter's route is not your problem and not the intervening country's business.

And it created a small permanent secretariat, the International Office of the General Postal Union, paid for by all the members, to collect, publish and distribute information about the international postal service and to answer questions put to it.

What it looks like now

There is a monument in Bern, unveiled in 1909, in which bronze figures hand letters to each other around a globe. It is the sort of thing a confident century put up about its own arrangements, and in this case the confidence was earned.

The treaty was concluded for three years. It is in its hundred and fifty second.

Sources

• "Treaty Concerning the Formation of a General Postal Union, signed at Bern, 9 October 1874", official United States government translation (Article 1 constituting the signatories a single postal territory; the list of signatory countries; the union rate of 25 centimes for a single prepaid letter with a permitted band of 20 to 32 and a single letter defined as up to 15 grammes; unpaid letters charged at double the destination rate; compulsory prepayment of post cards at half the letter rate; the surcharge for sea conveyance beyond 300 nautical miles capped at half the letter rate; the 7 centime rate for printed matter within a band of 5 to 11 and the weight limits of 250 and 1,000 grammes; the clause that each administration keeps the whole of the sums it collects so that no accounts between administrations are necessary; the guarantee of the right of transit throughout the territory of the Union; the establishment of the International Office; the supersession of the previous special treaties; the entry into force on 1 July 1875 and the three year term with indefinite prolongation and a year's notice of withdrawal; and the next congress at Paris in 1877).
• Wikisource editorial note to the Treaty of Bern (the congress convened by the Swiss government on 15 September 1874, the 22 nations represented, Heinrich von Stephan's role in drawing up the plans, the signature on 9 October 1874, the renaming to Universal Postal Union in 1878 in view of the membership, and World Post Day observed on 9 October).
• Universal Postal Union, "History" (the organisation's own account of its foundation at Bern and of what the treaty established).
• Swiss National Museum, "The story of the Universal Postal Union" (the Swiss account of the congress and of Bern's role in hosting the union).
• "Universal Postal Union monument, Bern" (the 1909 monument in the Kleine Schanze gardens, showing figures passing letters around a globe).