Meanwhile in the mother country the Post-Office continued to be a source of revenue; but its natural capacities were impaired by a defective system, without an animating soul. It was merely a machine for carrying a few letters and putting money into the public treasury. Though still on a small scale, its processes were multifarious. The rates were constantly altered, and generally increased in amount, as also in number, in each of the three kingdoms, and without uniformity in either two. From two or three, in 1710, they rose in number until they reached the climax of absurdity and inconvenience in twelve different rates for England and Scotland in 1812, and thirteen for Ireland in 1814.[45] The impracticable system, with rates at once numerous and high, led to perpetual evasions, while the franking privilege was a charge without an equivalent. At last the day of revolution came. After careful inquiry the old system was swept away, and with it no less than one hundred and fifty Acts of Parliament by which it was incumbered.[46] The old was succeeded by the new, and the change was complete. No institution in history ever underwent at once a transformation so beneficent as that of the British Post-Office.
Next after Benjamin Franklin, Rowland Hill will be enrolled as the most remarkable character in the history of the Post-Office. The son of a schoolmaster, of simple life, and without any connection with the postal service, he conceived the idea of radical reform. It is not too much to say that he became the inventor or author of cheap postage. More than all Franklin did for the Colonies Hill did for Great Britain. Call him inventor or author, there are few on either list more worthy of honor; and since what is done for one country becomes the common property of the world, he belongs to the world’s benefactors.
Rowland Hill well observed, that, while population, business, and all other sources of national revenue had greatly increased during the preceding twenty years, the revenue of the Post-Office had actually decreased; that, for instance, the revenue from stage-coaches had risen from £217,671 in 1815 to £498,497 in 1835, or one hundred and twenty-nine per cent., while the postal revenue, which at a corresponding rate of increase should have exhibited a gain of £2,000,000, in point of fact showed an absolute loss of near £20,000, having declined from £1,557,291 in 1815 to £1,540,300 in 1835.[47] Evidently there was something abnormal, when the conveyance of persons and parcels yielded a revenue so much beyond that of letters. After showing the loss to the revenue, the generous reformer demonstrated clearly that the actual cost of carrying a letter by coach in the mail from London to Edinburgh, being four hundred miles, was only one thirty-sixth part of a penny,[48]—from which it was properly inferred that the actual difference of expense between transporting a letter one mile and delivering it and transporting it four hundred miles and delivering it did not justify a different rate of postage. His conclusion was, that the large cost of distributing letters grew out of a complex and multifarious system, springing especially from many rates,—that all this would be superseded, if postage were charged, without regard to distance, at a uniform rate, and that this uniform rate should be one penny; and he did not hesitate to declare that with this change there would be an increase in correspondence “at least five and a quarter fold.”[49] In his original proposition, Rowland Hill relied especially upon a uniform rate at a penny, regardless of distance,—and from this promised simplicity, economy, and an immense increase of correspondence. But, offensive as the franking privilege had become, and burdensome to the postal service, he did not at first propose its excision.
His plan encountered that honest opposition which improvement of all kinds is obliged to overcome. The record is most instructive. The Postmaster-General, Lord Lichfield, said in the House of Lords: “Of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard of, it is the most extravagant.” On another occasion the same high official assured the House, that, if the anticipated increase of letters should be realized, “the mails will have to carry twelve times as much in 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.”[50] In the same spirit with his chief, Colonel Maberly, the experienced Secretary of the Post-Office, in his testimony before the Committee, did not hesitate to say: “It appears to me a most preposterous plan, utterly unsupported by facts, and resting entirely on assumption.” And he proceeded to predict a loss of revenue from its adoption, saying, that, if postage were reduced to one penny, the revenue “would not recover itself for forty or fifty years.”[51] The London “Quarterly Review,” with its habitual obstructiveness, set itself against the new plan and its promised result, saying: “Common sense is astounded at such a result and refuses to believe it, though it cannot at first sight discover where the fallacies lie; but a little examination will show, that, as usual, common sense is right, even against the assumed accuracy of arithmetic.”[52] I give these as illustrative examples of the opposition encountered.
Against all these stood Rowland Hill, insisting that the Post-Office, although now “rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements,” in contemplation of the proposed reform “assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization, capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of national education.”[53]
The proposed reform was vindicated as practical and valuable, first by witnesses before the Parliamentary Committee, and then in Parliamentary debate. The Committee examined no less than eighty-nine witnesses. These were from every rank and nearly every trade and profession,—peers of the realm, members of the House of Commons, authors, publishers, merchants, bankers, mechanics, common carriers, clergymen, solicitors, Post-Office officials, and others. Among the witnesses were Richard Cobden, Charles Knight, Rowland Hill, Dionysius Lardner, and Lord Ashburton.[54] The testimony embraced eleven thousand six hundred and fifty-four questions and answers, and filled three large folio volumes bound in two, making altogether nearly sixteen hundred pages. The Index alone makes one hundred and fifty-three pages.
Among the many things testified before the Committee I select the words of Lord Ashburton, as especially valuable. Experienced in business and in public life, he pictures truthfully the burden of excessive postage, when he says:—
“I think it is one of the worst of our taxes. We have, unfortunately, many taxes which have an injurious tendency; but I think few, if any, have so injurious a tendency as the tax upon the communication by letters.”
And then again:—