Читать книгу Foot-prints of a letter carrier; or, a history of the world's correspondece - James Rees - Страница 26

“Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,

Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame.”

On Allen’s death the cross-posts were brought under the control of the postmaster-general, and the success of the amalgamation was so complete that at the end of the first year profits to the amount of £20,000 were handed over to the crown. In subsequent years the proceeds continued to increase still more rapidly, so that when the by-letter office was abolished in 1799 they had reached the sum of £200,000 per annum.

In the time of George I. the whole London post-office establishment, which at present numbers several thousand officers of different grades, was worked, without counting letter-carriers, by a staff of thirty-two persons only.

The treasury warrants—warrants directed to the masters of packet service, towards 1701—franked, as Mr. Lewins observes, the strangest commodities. Among others, fifteen couple of hounds going to the King of the Romans, two maid-servants going as laundresses to my lord ambassador Methuen, Doctor Chrichton, carrying with him a case and divers necessaries, two bales of stockings for the use of the ambassador to the court of Portugal, and four flitches of bacon for Mr. Pennington, of Rotterdam. Nor were these the only abuses. So little precaution was used in the reigns of George I. and George II. that thousands of letters passed through the post-office with the forged signatures of members. Even in the early part of the reign of George III. it was related, in the investigation of 1763, that one man had in the course of five months counterfeited one thousand two hundred dozens of franks of different members of Parliament. In the year 1763 the worth of franked correspondence passing through the post-office was estimated at £170,000. In 1764, when George III. had been four years on the throne, it was enacted that no letter should pass franked through the post-office unless the whole address was in the M. P.’s handwriting with his signature attached. In 1784, frauds still continuing, it was ordered that franks should be dated, the month should be given in full, such letters to be put into the post on the day they were dated. From 1784 to the date of the penny postage, no further regulations were made as to the franked correspondence, the estimated value of which during these years was £80,000 annually.

It was fifteen years after the death of the kindly and benevolent Allen, the postmaster of Bath, that John Palmer, also of Bath, and one of the greatest of post-office reformers, rose into notice. Originally a brewer, Mr. Palmer was in 1784 the manager of the Bath and Bristol theatres. Having frequently to correspond with and travel to London, Mr. Palmer found that letters which left Bath on the Monday night were not delivered in London until the Wednesday afternoon or night, but that the stage-coach which left through the day on Monday arrived in London on the following morning. He pointed out to the authorities that commercial men and tradesmen, for safety and speed, sent their correspondence as parcels, robberies from carelessness and incompetence of post-office servants being then frequent. Mr. Palmer was ready with remedies for these countless defects. In 1783 he submitted his scheme to Mr. Pitt, who lent a ready ear. The officials, however, were first to be consulted; and they, as is their wont, made many and sweeping objections to changes which they represented not only to be impracticable and impossible, but dangerous to commerce and the revenue. Mr. Pitt, however, as Mr. M. D. Hill says in an article on the post-office, inherited his great father’s contempt for impossibilities. He saw that Mr. Palmer’s scheme would be as profitable as it was practicable, and he resolved that it should be adopted.

Mr. Palmer was installed at the post-office on the day of the change, under the title of Controller-General. It was arranged that his salary should be £1500 a year, together with a commission of two and a half per cent. upon any excess of revenue over £240,000. The rates of postage were now slightly raised; but, notwithstanding, the number of letters began most perceptibly to increase. Several of the principal towns, and notably Liverpool and York, petitioned the treasury for the new mail-coaches. But, though manifest success attended the introduction of the Palmer scheme, yet the authorities were determinedly opposed to the reformer, and he had to contend with them single-handed. In 1792, when his plans had been about eight years in operation and were beginning to exhibit elements of success, it was deemed desirable that Palmer should surrender his appointment. In consideration, however, of his valuable services, a pension of £3000 per annum was granted to him; but this sum fell far short of the emoluments which had been promised to him, and he memorialized the government, but without success. He protested against this treatment, and his son, General Palmer, member for Bath, frequently urged his father’s claims before Parliament; but it was not until 1813, after a struggle of twenty years, that the House of Commons voted him a grant of £50,000. This great benefactor of his country died in 1818. In the first year of the introduction of his plans, the net revenue of the post-office was about £250,000. Twenty years afterwards, the proceeds had increased sixfold, to no less a sum than a million and a half,—an increase doubtless partly attributable to the increase of population, but mainly to the punctuality and security of the new arrangements. Mails not only travelled quicker, but Mr. Palmer augmented their number between the largest towns: three hundred and eighty towns, which had in the olden time but three deliveries a week, had in 1797 a daily delivery. The Edinburgh coach required less time by sixty hours to travel from London; and there was a corresponding reduction between towns at shorter distances. For many years after their introduction, not a single attempt was made to rob Palmer’s mail-coaches, which were efficiently guarded.

In 1836 there were fifty four-horse mails in England, whereas forty years before there was not a third of the number. We remember the annual procession of the mail-coaches on the king’s birthday,—a gay spectacle, which Mr. Lewins is not old enough to remember. Coachmen and guards on that occasion donned a new red livery, and all the coachmen and most of the guards wore bouquets in their button-holes. In the year 1814 the business of the post-office had increased so greatly that better accommodation was sought than was afforded by the office then in Lombard Street. The first general post-office, opened in Cloak Lane, was removed from thence to the Black Swan, in Bishopsgate Street. After the fire of 1666 a general post-office was opened in Covent Garden; but it was soon removed to Lombard Street. In 1825 the government acquiesced in the views of the great majority of London residents, and St. Martin’s-le-Grand was chosen for the site of a new building, to be erected from the designs of Sir R. Smirke.

It was opened for business in September, 1829. From the date of the opening, improvements ceased to be pertinaciously resisted. It was not, however, till the late Duke of Richmond became the postmaster-general, in the ministry of the late Earl Grey, in 1830, that improvements were earnestly forwarded by the head of the department. The duke, a highly public-spirited and patriotic man, was indefatigable in the service of the department over which he was placed from 1830 to 1834. At first his grace refused to accept any remuneration for his services; but at length, in compliance with the strong representations of the treasury lords as to the objectionable nature of gratuitous services, “which must involve in many cases the sacrifice of private fortune to official station,” he consented to draw his salary from the date of the treasury minute already referred to. In 1834, Lord Grey’s postmaster-general submitted a list of improvements to the treasury lords, in which at least thirty substantial measures of reform were proposed. It was under this functionary that amalgamation of the Irish and Scotch offices with the English took place.

The railway for the first few years of its existence exerted but little influence on post-office arrangements. On the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester line, however, in 1830, the mails of the district were consigned to the new company for transmission. After railways had been in existence seven or eight years, their influence became paramount, and in 1838 and 1839 acts were passed to provide for the conveyance of mails by them.

It was in 1836 that Sir Francis Freeling, who had been secretary to the post-office since 1797, a period of forty years, died. He was an industrious public servant of the old school, strictly performing his duty according to ancient precedent and routine. He was succeeded in his office by Colonel Maberly, the son of a gentleman who, having amassed a considerable fortune by trade, entered Parliament, and ultimately succeeded Perry as the proprietor of the “Morning Chronicle.” Colonel Maberly had been himself in Parliament, and was generally considered a good man of business; but he was an entire stranger to the business of the post-office, and, according to his own evidence before the Select Committee on Postage, was introduced into the office by the treasury for the purpose of carrying into effect the reforms which a commission of inquiry had recommended.

On the fall of Sir R. Peel’s administration, in 1835, the Earl of Lichfield succeeded to the office of postmaster-general under Lord Melbourne. It must be admitted that the new postmaster and secretary introduced many important reforms. The money-order office was transferred from private hands to the general establishment. At this juncture also commenced the system of registering valuable letters, and, at the suggestion of Mr. Rowland Hill, a number of day mails were started for the provinces.

At the close of 1836 the stamp-duty on newspapers was reduced from 3-1/4d. to 1d.,—a reduction which led to an enormous increase in the newspapers passing through the post-office.

But, though these improvements were in themselves commendable, the authorities still tenaciously clung to the old rates of postage, and refused to listen to any plan for the reduction of postage-rates. Colonel Maberly, the secretary, had no sooner learned the business of his office than he made a proposition to the treasury that the letters should be charged in all cases according to the exact distance between the places where a letter was posted and delivered, and not according to the full distance. The lords of the treasury promptly refused, to use the language of Mr. Lewins, “this concession.”

In 1837 the average general postage was estimated at 9-1/2d. per letter; exclusive of foreign letters, it was still as high as 8-3/4d. It is a curious but significant fact that in the reign of Queen Anne the postage of a letter between London and Edinburgh was less than half as much as the amount charged at the accession of Queen Victoria. The fact that the revenue derived from so well-protected a monopoly remained stationary for nearly twenty years may be fairly attributable to these high postage-rates.17

Mr. Lewins states that the revenue derived in 1815 from the post-office amounted to a million and a half; while twenty-one years afterwards,—in 1836,—notwithstanding the increase of trade and the diffusion of knowledge, the increase of this sum had only been between three and four thousand pounds. The evil of high rates led not merely to small returns, but to the evasion of postage by illicit means of conveyance, so that some carriers of letters were doing as large a business as the post-office itself.

This will appear evident from the statement that a post-office official seized a parcel containing eleven hundred letters in a single bag in the warehouse of a London carrier. The head of this firm proffered instant payment of £500 if the penalties were not sued for. The postmaster-general accepted the offer, and the letters passed through the post-office on the same night.

So early as 1833, the late Mr. Wallace, M. P. for Greenock, drew the attention of the House of Commons to the numerous abuses in the post-office. There can be no question that his frequent motions and speeches directed public attention specifically to the subject and incalculably advanced the cause of reform. Mr. Wallace was not aided by the government or by the aristocracy or higher professional classes; but he derived much active support from the mercantile and manufacturing community, and from the shopkeepers in all the great towns of the empire.

It was the ventilation of the subject of the post-office by the member for Greenock that first drew the attention of Mr.—now Sir—Rowland Hill, to the subject. The son of a country schoolmaster, Mr. Hill had for a long time acted as usher at his father’s establishment at Birmingham. Being of an active and energetic disposition, he left the paternal roof for the metropolis, and was in 1833, when he was about thirty-eight years of age, secretary to the commissioners for the colonization of South Australia. Here he exhibited powers of organization, and we have from his own pen a statement that he read very carefully all the reports on post-office subjects. He put himself into communication with Mr. Wallace, M. P., who afforded him much assistance. He also corresponded with Lord Lichfield, then postmaster-general, who imparted to him the official information he sought. In January, 1837, Mr. Hill published the results of his investigations and embodied his schemes in a pamphlet entitled “Post-Office Reform: its Importance and Practicability.” The pamphlet created a sensation in the mercantile world. It was well noticed in the “Spectator” and “Morning Chronicle,” to both of which journals Mr. Hill’s elder brother Matthew, now a commissioner of bankruptcy at Bristol, contributed. Mr. Rowland Hill contended that the post-office was not making progress like other great national interests,—that its revenue had diminished instead of increased, though the population had augmented six millions and trade and commerce had proportionally increased. From data in his possession Mr. Hill pretty accurately proved that the primary distribution, as he called the cost of receiving and delivering the letters, and also the cost of transit, took two-thirds of the total cost of the management of the post-office. Out of the total postal expenditure of £700,000, Mr. Hill calculated that the amount which had to do with the distance letters travelled amounted to £144,000. From calculations which he then made, he arrived at the conclusion that the average cost of conveying each letter was less than the one-tenth of a penny. By this process he deduced the conclusion that postage ought to be uniform. The propriety of a uniform rate was further demonstrated by the fact that under the old system the cost of transmission was not always dependent on distance. The case was made still plainer by these facts. An Edinburgh letter, costing the post-office an infinitesimal fraction of a farthing, was charged 1s. 1-1/2d., while a letter for Louth, in Lincolnshire, costing the post-office fifty times as much, was charged 10d.

Mr. Hill’s four proposals were:—1st, a large diminution in the rates of postage, even to 1d. in a half-ounce letter; 2d, increased speed in the delivery of letters; 3d, more frequent opportunity for the despatch of letters; 4th, simplification and economy in the management of the post-office, the rate of postage being uniform.

In February, 1838, Mr. Wallace moved for a select committee of the Commons to investigate Mr. Hill’s proposals; but the government resisted the measure. Lord Lichfield, the postmaster-general, described it as a wild, visionary, and extravagant scheme. The public at large were greatly dissatisfied. Some of the most influential men in the city of London established a committee for the purpose of distributing information on the subject by means of pamphlets and papers and for the general purposes of the agitation. A month or two after Mr. Wallace’s motion, Mr. Baring, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed a committee to inquire into the present rates of charging postage, with a view to such reduction as may be made without injury to the revenue, and for them to examine into the mode of collecting and charging postage recommended by Mr. Rowland Hill. The committee sat sixty-three days, concluding their deliberations in August, 1838. They examined the principal officers of the post-office, and eighty-three independent witnesses.

In opposition to the views of official men, Mr. Hill held that a fivefold increase in the number of letters would suffice to preserve the existing revenue, and he predicted that the increase would soon be reached. He showed that the stage-coaches then in existence could carry twenty-seven times the number of letters they had ever yet done. The post-office authorities traversed every statement of Mr. Hill and his supporters, and Colonel Maberly expressed an opinion that if the postage were reduced to one penny the revenue would not recover itself for forty or fifty years. But, notwithstanding the opposition of the post-office authorities, the committee reported for a reduction of the rates, for the more frequent despatch of letters, and for additional deliveries, adding that the extension of railways made these changes urgently necessary. They further urged that the principle of a low uniform rate was just, and that when combined with prepayment it would be convenient and satisfactory.

The commissioners, consisting of Lord Seymour, Lord Duncannon, and Mr. Labouchere, proposed that any letter not exceeding half an ounce should be conveyed free within the metropolis, and the district to which the town and country deliveries extend, if enclosed in an envelope bearing a penny stamp.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer had the plan of a uniform rate of postage embodied in a bill, which passed in the session of 1839. This act, approved by a majority of one hundred and two members, conferred temporarily the necessary power on the lords of the treasury. On the 12th of November, 1839, their lordships issued a minute reducing the postage of all inland letters to the uniform rate of 4d. The country was greatly dissatisfied. It required Mr. Hill’s plan; and the fourpenny rate was in no respect his. The treasury lords were at length convinced they had made a mistake, and on the 10th of January, 1840, another minute was issued, ordering the adoption of a uniform penny rate. On the 10th of August the treasury had its minute confirmed by the statute 3 & 4 Vict. c. 96. A treasury appointment was given to Mr. Hill, to enable him to assist in carrying out the penny postage. He only, however, held the appointment for about two years; for when the conservative party came into power the originator of the penny postage lost his situation. Mr. Hill entreated to be allowed to remain at any sacrifice to himself, but Sir R. Peel was obdurate.

Mr. Hill’s popularity increased with his dismissal. A public subscription was opened for him throughout the country, as an expression of national gratitude, which amounted to over £13,000. On the restoration of the whigs to power, in 1846, he was placed in St. Martin’s-le-Grand as secretary to the postmaster-general. In 1854, on Colonel Maberly’s removal to the audit-office, he was named secretary to the post-office under the late Lord Canning,—the highest appointment in the department. In 1860 the secretary of the post-office was made a Knight Commander of the Bath. During the autumn of 1863 his health began to fail him, and in March of the present year (1865) he resigned his situation. The executive government showed a just and liberal sense of Sir Rowland Hill’s merits. By a treasury minute of the 11th of March, 1864, advantage was taken by the government of the special clause in the Superannuation Act relating to extraordinary services, to grant him a pension of three times the usual retiring allowance. This was not merely a just but a generous act; and the language in which the resolution was couched was not official, nor solemnly and decorously dull, as is usual on such occasions, but encomiastic in the highest degree. Sir Rowland Hill was pronounced not merely a meritorious public servant, but a “benefactor of his race.” We do not say this eulogistic epithet was not deserved, for we think it was well merited; but we may be permitted to remark that Sir Rowland Hill has lived in a felicitous time, thus promptly to find his merits officially recognized on retiring from his labors.

Harvey, Jenner, Palmer of Bath, of whom we have antecedently spoken, and scores of other discoverers and philanthropists, were less fortunate than the late post-office secretary. Sir Rowland Hill was not only allowed to retire on his full salary of £2000 per annum, but Lord Palmerston gave notice that the pension should be continued to Lady Hill in the event of her ladyship surviving her husband.18 Since this notice was given by the premier, an influential deputation of the house waited on the first minister of the crown, strongly urging that, in place of the deferred pension to Lady Hill, a Parliamentary grant, sufficient, though reasonable, should be made at once to the late secretary.

We do not say that the social, moral, and commercial results of the famous penny postage have not been singularly wondrous and beneficial, and that Mr. Hill does not deserve all that has been done for him by ministers, by his private friends and admirers, by the commercial and manufacturing community, and by the public at large. We think the late post-office secretary fully deserves every farthing that has been paid or that may be hereafter paid to him, whether as an annuity or a gratuity; we think he deserves the order of K.C.B., which he obtained, and, further, that he deserves to have his merits and his name commemorated by a statue intended to be erected at Birmingham in his honor. But how few are there in this world of ours who obtain a tithe of their deserts! Neither Harvey, Jenner, Newton, nor Locke was properly rewarded by his country. Newton, indeed, passed many years of his life in straitened circumstances, and never had any employment which produced him more than from £1200 to £1500 per annum, while Locke’s commissionership of appeals gave him only the miserable pittance of £200 a year. It is the good fortune of Sir Rowland Hill to have flourished in more liberal times, when merit is fittingly acknowledged and rewarded.

The discovery of Sir Rowland Hill was not a brilliant and wonderful so much as a useful discovery, and there can be no doubt that he worked out all the details with a patience, a perseverance, and a judgment sure and unerring. When the system of penny postage had been in operation two years, it was found that the success of the scheme had surpassed the most sanguine expectations. It almost entirely prevented breaches of the law and that illicit correspondence by which the revenue had long been defrauded. Commercial transactions as to very small amounts were chiefly managed through the post: small money-orders were constantly transmitted from town to town and from village to village, the business of the money-order office having increased twentyfold. No men are more indebted to the system of the penny post than literary men, publishers, and printers,—manuscripts and proof-sheets now passing to and fro from one end of the kingdom to the other with care, cheapness, and celerity. Common carriers, too, are greatly benefited by the penny postage. Pickford & Co. now despatch by post more than ten times the number of letters they despatched in 1839. Mr. Charles Knight, the London publisher, stated that the penny postage stimulated every branch of his trade, and brought the country booksellers into daily communication with the London houses. Mr. Bagster, the publisher of the Polyglot Bible in twenty-four languages, stated to Mr. Hill that the revision which he was just giving to his work would on the old system have cost him £1500 in postage alone, and that the Bible could not be printed but for the penny post. One of the principal advocates for the repeal of the Corn Laws stated that the objects of the league were achieved two years earlier than otherwise, owing to the introduction of cheap postage. Conductors of schools and educational establishments stated how people were learning everywhere to write for the first time, in order to enjoy the benefits of a free correspondence. In all the large towns, too, it was remarked that night-classes were springing up for teaching writing to adults. As the system made progress with the public, Mr. Hill’s recommendations and improvements extended and expanded. A cheap registration started into existence, simplification was introduced in the mode of sorting letters, slits were suggested in the doors of houses, restriction as to the weight of parcels was removed, and a book-rate was established. It was also suggested that railway stations should have post-offices connected with them, and that sorting should be done in the train and in the packets. The union of the two corps of general and district letter-carriers, the establishment of district offices, and an hourly delivery instead of every two hours, were also suggested by Mr. Hill, and, after being strenuously combated by the authorities, carried by the indefatigable secretary.

The amalgamation of the general post and what were called the London district carriers did not take place till 1855, when the Duke of Argyll was postmaster-general. For this amalgamation Mr. Hill had been striving from the commencement. It avoided the waste of time, trouble, and expense consequent on two bodies of men—the one being paid at a much higher rate of wages—going over the same ground.

A more important step than this was the division of London into ten districts. Under the new arrangement, instead of district letters being carried from the receiving houses to the chief office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to be there sorted and redistributed, they were sorted and distributed at the district office according to their address. An important part of the new scheme was that London should be considered in the principal post-offices as ten different towns, each with its own centre of operations, and that the letters should be assorted and despatched on this principle. A new and special service was brought into operation between England and Ireland on the 1st of October, 1860. Night and day mail-trains have from that date been run from Euston Square to Holyhead, and special steamers have been employed at an enormous expense to cross the channel. Letter-sorting is now carried on not only in the trains but on board the packets, nearly all the post-office work for immediate delivery being accomplished between London and Dublin and Dublin and London respectively.19

The first letter penny post was established in Edinburgh by one Peter Williamson, a native of Aberdeen. He kept a coffee-shop in the Parliament House, and as he was frequently employed, by gentlemen attending the courts, in sending letters to different parts of the city, and as he had doubtless heard something of the English penny post, he began a regular post with hourly deliveries, and established agents at different parts of the city to collect.