“It is commercial suicide to restrict the free transmission of letters.”—(Sir) William Brown, a Liverpool merchant.
“We are cut off from our relatives by the high rates of postage.”—G. Henson, a working hosier of Nottingham.
In a short sketch of the postal reform written by my brother,[18] in the year of the late Queen's first jubilee— which was also the jubilee of the publication of our father's “Post Office Reform,” the pamphlet that swept away the old system—the following passage from Miss Martineau's “History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1815-1845” is quoted with excellent effect. From a novel point of view, and in somewhat startling colours, it presents us with a picture of the state of things which, under that old system, existed in our country through four-tenths (less one year) of the nineteenth century, and is therefore within the recollection of people still living.
We look back now, Miss Martineau says,[19] with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading days when warrior husbands and their wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons parted, with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear even of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence, and we feel the same now about the families of polar voyagers;[20] but till the commencement of Her Majesty's reign it did not occur to many of us how like to this was the fate of the largest classes in our own country. The fact is that there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country except for those who, like Members of Parliament, had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage to be a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast multitude of the poorer classes who suffered, like the crusading families of old, and the geographical discoverers of all time. When the young people went out into the world the separation between them and those left behind was almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as effectually as if seas or deserts divided them (vol. iv. p. 11).
Yet it was not so much the number of miles of severance or the paucity of means of communication that raised walls of oblivion between members of those poorer families which form the large majority of our race; for by 1840—the year when the postal reform was established—communication between even distant places was becoming comparatively easy. Separation was mainly caused by dear postal charges. Fourpence carried a letter 15 miles only; the average rate, even taking into account the many penny letters circulated by the local town-posts—which, it is said, numbered some two hundred, the greater part being very profitable undertakings—was 6-¼d.[21] Mr Brewin of Cirencester, in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee of 1838 (Third Report), put the case with startling effect when he said: “Sixpence is a third of a poor man's daily income. If a gentleman whose fortune is a thousand a year, or £3 a day, had to pay one-third of his daily income—a sovereign—for a letter, how often would he write letters of friendship?”
But Mr Brewin's illustration, admirable as it is, did not cover the entire case. And, first, it is worth pointing out that the “poor man's daily income” was not only actually smaller, but, generally speaking, it had also smaller purchasing power in the 'thirties than it came to have later in the century when freer trade and lighter taxation prevailed. The real hardship, however, was that too often the man “whose fortune is a thousand a year”—and sometimes much more—was, unlike his poorer brother on 1s. 6d. a day, exempt altogether from postal charges.
For the franking system is a hoary iniquity. It dates back considerably more than two hundred years. To such an extent was the practice, legally or illegally, carried, that, as Mr Joyce, in his “History of the Post Office,” tells us: “In Great Britain alone the postage represented by the franked letters, excluding those which were, or which purported to be, 'On His Majesty's Service,' amounted in 1716 to what was, for that time relatively to the total Post Office revenue, the enormous sum of £17,500 a year” (p. 142). By 1838 the number of franked missives was some 7,000,000 a year. Of these, rather less that 5,000,000 were “double” letters, about 2,000,000 eight-fold letters, and some 77,000 thirteen-fold letters, free carriage of which caused a loss to the revenue during the twelvemonths of about £1,065,000.
The franking privilege—which enabled its possessor to write his name outside a letter, thereby rendering it exempt from postal charge—was in vogue long before it received formal recognition by Parliament, and is indeed said to have been given by way of bribe to the Commons what time the Post Office became a Crown monopoly. The first intention was that franking should be enjoyed only by Members during each session; but later it was practised in and out of session. When the measure came before the House, a few Members condemned it as “shabby,” “a poor mendicant proviso,” etc. But the Bill was passed. The Upper House rejected it. Then the Commons, with a knowledge of human nature creditable to their understanding if to nothing else, inserted a clause providing that the Lords' letters should also be franked; whereupon the Bill became an Act.
The old system worked with great tenderness towards the “haves,” and with corresponding harshness towards the “have nots.” It enabled some members of the favoured classes to send by post free of charge such things as fifteen couples of hounds, two maid servants, a cow, two bales of stockings, a deal case containing flitches of bacon, a huge feather-bed, and other bulky products, animate and inanimate. “The 'Ambassador's bag,'” said Mr Roebuck one night in the House of Commons, “was often unduly weighted. Coats, lace, boots, and other articles were sent by it; even a pianoforte, and a horse!”[22]