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Postal Administrations Join Hands
As postal services developed and widened, frontiers between countries became more and more of an obstacle. Soon, it became necessary to solve these problems by concluding written agreements. One of the first was the agreement signed by the Postmaster General of Spain, Juan Taxis, and the superintendent of the French Post, G. Fouquet de la Verne. Under this treaty, the French post took care of the transportation of mail from Rome and the Netherlands to and from Spain. Many such agreements were signed as time passed. In 1873, Germany had seventeen valid bilateral postal agreements with other countries, France had sixteen agreements, Belgium fifteen and England twelve.
These bilateral agreements were rather unsatisfactory as they were concluded on the basis of different conditions and circumstances, and as a result produced a most complicated system of postal rates. It was necessary to replace all such bilateral agreements with a wider international system. The first international postal organization was the German-Austrian Postal Union founded in 1850, but this was an organization of limited territorial range.
One of the pioneers of a world wide postal organization was the Postmaster General of the United Sates, Montgomery Blair. In 1862, he handed the US Secretary of State such a proposal. On his initiative, an international conference was convened on 11th May, 1863 in Paris, and fifteen nations from Europe and the United States of America participated. On the agenda of the conference was the standardization of the weight of the mail and of postal rates. An international organization was not founded in Paris, but the recommendations of the conference had considerable influence on the later international agreement. A further influence of development was the founding of the International Telegraphic Union in 1865 in Paris.
The initiative in the forming of an international postal organization was later taken by the Postmaster General of Germany, Dr Heinrich von Stephan. In October, 1874, the first Postal Congress met in Berne, where twenty-two nations were represented, and the Universal Postal Union was founded. The agreement including a unified rate for letters (twenty-five centimes for fifteen grams), the principle that postage was to be paid by the sender, that for mail posted unfranked double the postage would be collected and the standardization of transit rates came into force on the 1st July, 1875.
The number of members of the Universal Postal Union was growing rapidly. In 1897, the UPU had sixty-two members, in 1939 there were eighty-eight and in 1961, the number had reached one hundred and twenty-four.
In addition to the UPU, there exist further international postal organizations. In 1911, the South American Postal Association was founded. At the Buenos Aires Congress of 1921, its name was changed to Panamerican Postal Union and its headquarters located in Montevideo. In 1954, an Arab Postal Union was founded. These organizations have regional authority and their member countries may also have membership with the UPU.
It is natural that scenes depicting the operations of the post in the past and present appear on postage stamps. A perfect occasion for such themes occurred in 1949 when the Universal Postal Union celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. Many commemorative stamps and sets were issued. On a number of these stamps, there is the memorial of the UPU in Berne where the headquarters of this union are located. This monument shows the shape of a globe with people of all nations handing each other letters all around the world.
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