CHEAP POSTAGE MULTIPLIES LETTERS.
The experience of England is reproduced in the United States, so far as we have ventured upon postage reform. Every reduction of rate has been followed by a corresponding increase in the number of letters. There was the law of 1845, by which postage was reduced to two principal rates of five and ten cents. At this proposition, which erred only in its feebleness, there was the gloomiest foreboding of utter loss to the Post-Office. The raven did not croak more hoarsely at the entrance of Duncan under the battlements of Macbeth. Mr. McDuffie, the excitable Senator from South Carolina, always sensitive for Slavery, after expressing regret that bodily infirmity disabled him from declaring the strength of his convictions in regard to the evils which would flow from this measure, protested against its adoption as “more radical and revolutionary than anything ever done in Congress.” The Senator denounced it as most unjust, and predicted that in ten years the Post-Office would cost the Treasury $10,000,000.[88] The newspaper press, though not so fervid, was as skeptical as the South Carolina Senator; and the Postmaster-General showed the very disposition which had given to his brother officials in England the designation of “unwilling horses.” In his first Report after the passage of the law, he announced a prospective deficiency for the current year exceeding $1,250,000, and, unless there should be some amendment of the law, another deficiency the next year of little short of $1,000,000.[89] Now mark the result of even this too slight reduction. The actual deficiency for 1845-6 was only $597,097,[90] and for 1846-7 it was but $33,677,[91] while in 1848-9 there was a surplus revenue of $226,127.[92] The letters in 1845 were estimated at 39,958,978; and in 1849 at 60,159,862,[93] showing an increase in four years of more than fifty per cent.
Every reduction of postage in our country exhibits similar results. According to the ratio of reduction has been the ratio of increase in the number of letters. It may surprise Senators to know, that, while the estimated number in 1852 was 95,790,524,[94] it reached in 1868 to 488,000,000, in the estimate of the Post-Office.[95] But this is only according to the prevailing impulsion from a reduction in price. In England, where the rate was smaller, the number of letters was much larger, being in 1867, as estimated, no less than 774,831,000.[96] This becomes more remarkable, when it is considered that the estimated population of the United States at the time was more than forty millions, while that of the United Kingdom was thirty millions,—making twelve letters annually for each person in the United States, and twenty-six letters annually for each person in the United Kingdom.