How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher,
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 12, 2016

In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), Scottish economist Adam Smith declared that a postal service is “perhaps the only mercantile project which has been successfully managed by, I believe, every sort of government.” Like a sound currency, an efficient civil service and a transportation network, it had become requisite for nationhood.