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Lake district, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of sight she showed Coleridge how his money had been wasted as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter; and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. Most persons would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell; but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It struck Mr. Rowland Hill that there must be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating, in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare."

Mr. Hill gradually worked out for himself a comprehensive scheme of reform. He put it before the world early in 1837. The public were taken by surprise when the plan came before them in the shape of a pamphlet, which its author modestly entitled "Post-office Reform; its importance and practicability." The root of Mr. Hill's system lay in the fact, made evident by him beyond dispute, that the actual cost of the conveyance of letters through the post was very trifling, and was but little increased by the distance over which they had to be carried.

His proposal was, therefore, that the rates of postage should be diminished to the minimum; that at the same time the speed of conveyance should be increased, and that there should be much greater frequency of despatch. His principle was, in fact, the very opposite of that which had prevailed in the calculations of the authorities. Their idea was that the higher the charge for letters the greater the return to the revenue. He started on the assumption that the smaller the charge the greater the profit. He, therefore, recommended the substitution of one uniform charge of one penny the half-ounce, without reference to the distance within the limits of the United Kingdom which the letter had to

be carried. The Post-office authorities were at first uncompromising in their opposition to the scheme. The Postmaster-general, Lord Lichfield, said in the House of Lords, that of all the wild and extravagant schemes he had ever heard of, it was the wildest and most extravagant. "The mails," he said, "will have to carry twelve times as much weight, and therefore the charge for transmission, instead of £100,000, as now, must be twelve times that amount. The walls of the Post-office would burst; the whole area in which the building stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and the letters." It is impossible not to be struck by the paradoxical peculiarity of this argument. Because the change would be so much welcomed by the public, Lord Lichfield argued that it ought not to be made. He did not fall back upon the then familiar assertion that the public would not send anything like the number of letters the advocates of the scheme expected. He argued that they would send so many as to make it troublesome for the Postoffice authorities to deal with them. In plain words, it would be such an immense accommodation to the population in general that the officials could not undertake the trouble of carrying it into effect. Another Post-office official, Colonel Maberley, was, at all events, more liberal. "My constant language," he said afterward, "to the heads of the departments was-This plan we know will fail. It is our duty to take care that no obstruction is placed in the way of it by the heads of the departments, and by the Post-office. The allegation, I have not the least doubt, will be made at a subsequent period, that this plan has failed in consequence of the unwillingness of the Government to carry it into fair execution. It is our duty, as servants of the Government, to take care that no blame eventually shall fall on the Government through any unwillingness of ours to carry it into proper effect." It is, perhaps, less surprising that the routine mind of officials should have seen no future but failure for the scheme, when so vigorous and untrammelled a thinker as Sydney Smith spoke with anger and contempt of the fact that "a million of revenue is given up in the nonsensical Penny-post scheme, to please my old, excellent, and universally dissentient friend, Noah Warburton." Mr. Warburton was then member for Bridport, and, with Mr. Wallace, anoth

er member of Parliament, was very active in supporting and promoting the views of Mr. Hill. "I admire the Whig Ministry," Sydney Smith went on to say, "and think they have done more good things than all the ministries since the Revolution; but these concessions are sad and unworthy marks of weakness, and fill reasonable men with alarm.”

It will be seen from this remark alone that the ministry had yielded somewhat more readily than might have been expected to the arguments of Mr. Hill. At the time his

pamphlet appeared a commission was actually engaged in inquiring into the condition of the Post-office department. Their attention was drawn to Mr. Hill's plan, and they gave it a careful consideration, and reported in its favor, although the Post-office authorities were convinced that it must involve an unbearable loss of revenue. In Parliament Mr. Wallace, whose name has been already mentioned, moved for a committee to inquire into the whole subject, and especially to examine the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage in the pamphlet of Mr. Hill. The committee gave the subject a very patient consideration, and at length made a report recommending uniform charges and prepayment by stamps. That part of Mr. Hill's plan which suggested the use of postage-stamps was adopted by him on the advice of Mr. Charles Knight. The Government took up the scheme with some spirit and liberality. The revenue that year showed a deficiency, but they determined to run the further risk which the proposal involved. The commercial community had naturally been stirred greatly by the project which promised so much relief and advantage. Sydney Smith was very much mistaken, indeed, when he fancied that it was only to please his old and excellent friend, Mr. Warburton, that the ministry gave way to the innovation. Petitions from all the commercial communities were pouring in to support the plan, and to ask that at least it should have a fair trial. The Government at length determined to bring in a bill which should provide for the almost immediate introduction of Mr. Hill's scheme, and for the abolition of the franking system except in the case of official letters actually sent on business directly belonging to her Majesty's service. The bill declared, as an introductory step, that the charge for postage should be at the rate

of fourpence for each letter under half an ounce in weight, irrespective of distance, within the limits of the United Kingdom. This, however, was to be only a beginning; for on January 10th, 1840, the postage was fixed at the uniform rate of one penny per letter of not more than half an ounce in weight. The introductory measure was not, of course, carried without opposition in both Houses of Parliament. The Duke of Wellington, in his characteristic way, declared that he strongly objected to the scheme; but, as the Government had evidently set their hearts upon it, he recommended the House of Lords not to offer any opposition to it. In the House of Commons it was opposed by Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Goulburn, both of whom strongly condemned the whole scheme as likely to involve the country in vast loss of revenue. The measure, however, passed into law. Some idea of the effect it has produced upon the postal correspondence of the country may be gathered from the fact that in 1839, the last year of the heavy postage, the number of letters delivered in Great Britain and Ireland was a little more than eighty-two millions, which included some five millions and a half of franked letters returning nothing to the revenues of the country; whereas, in 1875, more than a thousand millions of letters were delivered in the United Kingdom. The population during the same time has not nearly doubled itself. It has already been remarked that the principle of Sir Rowland Hill's reform has since been put into operation in every civilized country in the world. It may be added that before long we shall, in all human probability, see an interoceanic postage established at a rate as low as people sometimes thought Sir Rowland Hill a madman for recommending as applicable to our inland post. The time is not far distant when a letter will be carried from London to San Francisco, or to Tokio in Japan, at a rate of charge as small as that which made financiers stare and laugh when it was suggested as profitable remuneration for carrying a letter from London to the towns of Sussex or Hertfordshire. The "Penny-post," let it be said, is an older institution than that which Sir Rowland Hill introduced. A penny-post for the conveyance of letters had been set up in London so long ago as 1683; and it was adopted or annexed by the Government some years after. An effort was even made to set up

a half-penny post in London, in opposition to the official penny-post, in 1708; but the Government soon crushed this vexatious and intrusive rival. In 1738 Dr. Johnson writes to Mr. Cave "to entreat that you will be pleased to inform me, by the penny-post, whether you resolve to print the poem." After awhile the Government changed their penny-post to a twopenny-post, and gradually made a distinction between district and other postal systems, and contrived to swell the price for deliveries of all kinds. Long before even this time of the penny-post, the old records of the city of Bristol contain an account of the payment of one penny for the carriage of letters to London. It need hardly be explained, however, that a penny in that time, or even in 1683, was a payment of very different value indeed from the modest sum which Sir Rowland Hill was successful in establishing. The ancient penny-post resembled the modern penny-post only in name.

CHAPTER V.

CHARTISM.

Ir cannot, however, be said that all the omens under which the new Queen's reign opened at home were as auspicious as the coincidences which made it contemporary with the first chapters of these new and noble developments in the history of science and invention. On the contrary, it began amidst many grim and unpromising conditions in our social affairs. The winter of 1837-38 was one of unusual severity and distress. There would have been much discontent and grumbling in any case among the class described by French writers as the prolétaire; but the complaints were aggravated by a common belief that the young Queen was wholly under the influence of a frivolous and selfish minister, who occupied her with amusements while the poor were starving. It does not appear that there was at any time the slightest justification for such a belief; but it prevailed among the working-classes and the poor very generally, and added to the sufferings of genuine want the bitterness of imaginary wrong. Popular education was little looked after; so far

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