On the other hand, the unfavoured many were heavily taxed for the transmission of missives often smaller, easier of carriage, and lighter of weight; and were so taxed to make up for the immunity enjoyed by the favoured few, since the revenue, at all costs, must be maintained. Thus to Rowland Hill's parents, and to many thousands more, in those days of slender income and heavy taxation, the postman's knock was a sound of dread. The accepted letter might prove to be a worthless circular or other useless sheet, on which the too-trusting recipient had thrown away the money needed for necessary things whose purchase must be deferred.
Incredibly high the postal rates sometimes were. A packet weighing 32 oz. was once sent from Deal to London. The postage was over £6, being, as Rowland Hill's informant remarked, four times as much as the charge for an inside place by the coach.[23] Again, a parcel of official papers, small enough to slip inside an ordinary pocket, was sent from Dublin to another Irish town addressed to Sir John Burgogne. By mistake it was charged as a letter instead of as a parcel, and cost £11! For that amount the whole mail-coach plying between the two towns, with places for seven passengers and their luggage, might have been hired. Extreme cases these perhaps, but that they could and did happen argued something rotten in the state of—the old system.
The peers of the realm and the Members of Parliament could not only frank their own letters, but those also of their friends, who, perhaps, in nine cases out of ten could well afford to do without such help. The number of franks which privileged people could write was limited by law,[24] but was frequently exceeded if a donor hated to say “No,” or found that compliance with requests enhanced his popularity, or was to his advantage. Members of Parliament sometimes signed franks by the packet, and gave them to constituents and friends. It was an easy, inexpensive way of making a present, or of practising a little bribery and corruption. The chief offenders were said to be the banker Members, who, in one day (of 1794), sent 103,000 franked letters through the London Post Office alone. No wonder a “banker's frank” came to be a byword. Franks were also sometimes given to servants instead of, or to eke out, their wages; and the servants, being then as a rule illiterate, sold the franks again.
Forgery of franks was extensively practised, since to imitate a man's writing is not difficult. Mr Joyce tells us that, under the old system, the proportion of counterfeit to genuine franks varied from half to three-quarters of the entire number. Why forgery should be resorted to is easy to understand. The unprivileged nursed a natural grudge against the privileged, and saw no harm in occasionally enjoying a like immunity from postal charges. Prosecutions availed little as deterrents. Even the fate of the Rev. Dr Dodd, hanged at Tyburn in 1771 for the offence, could not check the practice.
The strictness of the rules against forging the frank on a letter, so long a capital offence, contrasted strangely with the extraordinary laxity of those relating to the franking of newspapers. To pass freely through the post, a newspaper, like a letter, had to be franked by a peer or a Member of Parliament. But no pretence was ever made that the signatures were genuine; and not only was anybody at liberty to write the name of peer or Member, but the publishers themselves were accustomed to issue the newspapers with their customer's name and address, and the franking signature already printed on each cover! Indeed, were this useless form to be disregarded, the paper was counted as an unpaid letter, and became liable to a charge of perhaps several shillings.
The cost of conveying newspapers by post was practically covered by the duty stamp. Yet “No newspaper could be posted in any provincial town for delivery within the same, nor anywhere within the London District (a circle of 12 miles radius from the General Post Office) for delivery within the same circle, unless a postage of 1d., in addition to the impressed newspaper stamp, were paid upon it—a regulation which, however, was constantly evaded by large numbers of newspapers intended for delivery in London being sent by newsagents down the river to be posted at Gravesend, the Post Office then having the trouble of bringing them back, and of delivering them without charge.”[25]
The newspaper duty at its lowest charge was 1d., and at its highest 4d., and varied with the varying burden of taxation. Thus during the long period of George III.'s almost incessant wars it rose from the lower to the higher figure. Before a word could be printed on any newspaper the blank sheet had to be taken to the Stamp Office to receive the impress of the duty stamp, and therefore prepayment of newspaper postage was secured. It may be that when the stamp duty rose to 3d. and 4d., the official conscience was satisfied that sufficient payment had been made; and thus the franking signature became an unnecessary survival, a mere process of lily-painting and refined gold-gilding, which at some future time might be quietly got rid of. If so, the reason becomes evident why the forgery of franks on newspapers was viewed with leniency, the authorities having, by means of the stamp, secured their “pound of flesh.” But no duty stamp was ever impressed on letters which were treated altogether differently, prepayment in their case being, if not actually out of the question, so rare as to be practically non-existent.
The duty on newspapers was an odious “tax on knowledge,” and rendered a cheap Press impossible. Only the well-to-do could indulge in the luxury of a daily paper; and recollection of childish days brings back a vision of the sheet passing through a succession of households till its contents had become “ancient history,” and it ended its existence in tatters. The repeal of the stamp duty and of that other “tax unwise,” the paper duty, changed all this, and gave rise to the penny and halfpenny Press of modern times and the cheap and good books that are now within the reach of all. The fact is worth recording that yet another—perhaps more than one other—article of daily use did duty in a plurality of households during those far-off days of general dearness. This was tea, then so costly that it was a common practice for poor people to call at the houses of the well-to-do, and ask for the used leaves, though not to cleanse carpets and glassware as we do at the present day, but to infuse afresh.
The making of exemptions is a huge mistake; and, according to the cynic, a mistake is more reprehensible than a crime. Exemptions create discontent, and justly so. Peel, inimical as he was to the postal reform, was well aware of the evils of the franking system, and said that “were each Government Department required to pay its own postage, much would be done towards checking the abuse.”[26]
It was Rowland Hill's wish that franking should be totally abolished. But vested interests—that worst bar to all social progress—proved stronger than the reformer; and his plan, in that and some other details, was not carried out in its entirety. Franking was enormously curtailed, but it was a scotching rather than a killing process; and after his retirement the evil thing slowly but steadily increased. Nor does the tendency at the present day give sign of abatement.