Abuse of the Franking Privilege
Attention has been officially called to the abuse of the franking privilege by Rev. W. F. Crafts, of National Reform Bureau fame, and the Washington Post has expressed its view of the case as follows:— We fail to see, however, that blame can rightly be attached to Mr. Crafts in this particular affair. . . . Everybody says that he is an earnest, unworldly servant of reform, laboring in and out of season to purify the morals of other people—chiefly by removing temptation from their pathways. He has had a call to rescue mankind from sin, to lift them up to the dizzy altitudes upon which he habitually roosts, and generally to make them nearly as good as he is, if he can. We have no right to require of him the smallest familiarity with profane things. . . . The Rev. Crafts is toiling for the salvation of mankind. Sometimes we wish he were doing it to the heathen in distant and inaccessible lands — say, darkest Africa or the Solomon Islands, for instance — but nobody can make us believe that he used those franks unrighteously or with any thought of private gain. Either the Post is indulging in a happy vein of irony or it regards Mr. Crafts as an irresponsible reform crank. In either case his influence with Congress is not increased. We have no malice toward Mr. Crafts, but we are not in sympathy with his ideas of reform, nor with his methods of conducting his campaign.