[110] “The Story of Gladstone's Life,” p. 38. By Justin M'Carthy.
[111] “Life,” i. 342. How well the great orator understood his poorer countrymen's need was shown when, for a few weeks before the 10th of January 1840, a tentative reduction to a uniform fourpenny rate outside London was introduced. The increase of letters during those few weeks stood at, for England and Wales, 33; Scotland, 51; and Ireland, 52 per cent. When my father and his brothers—as told in the Introductory Chapter—used to wander about the “green borderland” outside the smaller Birmingham and Wolverhampton of the early nineteenth century, they sometimes, in the summer and autumn seasons, fell in with the Irish haymakers and harvesters, and were struck with the frugal manner in which they lived, their sobriety and their unwillingness to break into the little hoard of money—their wages—which they aimed to take back intact to their families in Ireland at the end of their few months' service here. The postal reform enabled these men to write letters and to send their money home cheaply, frequently, and without waiting for the season's close.
[112] Writing of penny postage, eight years later, to the American historian Bancroft, Hume said: “I am not aware of any reform amongst the many I have promoted during the past forty years that has had, and will have, better results towards the improvement of the country, socially, morally, and politically.”
[113] In Earl Russell's “Recollections,” at p. 231, a quotation is made from an entry in his journal for 1839, which says: “The Cabinet”—of which he was a member—“was unanimous in favour of the ingenious and popular plan of a penny postage.”
[114] “Life,” i. 343.
[115] Only those who remember any of the generation which lived through the long and anxious years of the terrible war with France can form an adequate idea of the veneration—adoration even—felt by the nation for the great Duke—the Duke as he was generally called. My father, at no time addicted to the “scarlet fever,” was nevertheless one of the heartiest devotees; and one day during our three years' sojourn at Brighton he took some of us children to the railway station to see the veteran, then about to return to town after a visit to the seaside. There he sat alone under the sheltering hood of his open carriage which, with its back turned towards the locomotive, was mounted on an ordinary truck at the rear end of the train. He wore a dark, military cloak and close-fitting cloth cap, and with his thin face, hooked nose, and piercing eyes looked like an ancient eagle. His unwandering gaze was bent sea-wards as though he descried a foreign fleet making with hostile intentions for our shores. He was so used to being stared at that but for his at once giving the military salute in acknowledgment of our father's respectful bow and bared head, we might have thought him unconscious of the presence of strangers. He seemed so to be even when our father took us close to the train, and bade us look well at the greatest of living Englishmen because he was so old that we might not see him again. It would, however, have been difficult to forget a face so striking. After all, that was not our only sight of him. We often afterwards saw him riding in Hyde Park, where the crowd saluted him as if he were Royalty itself; and, later still, we looked on at his never-to-be-forgotten funeral. Mention of the “Iron Duke” and of the Brighton railway brings back to memory another old soldier who figured in the same wars and, as Earl of March, achieved distinction. This was the then Duke of Richmond, on whom we children looked with awesome curiosity, because rumour, for once a truth-teller, declared that ever since 1815 he had carried somewhere within his corporeal frame a bullet which defied all attempts at extraction, and, indeed, did not prevent his attaining to a hale old age. While my father was on the directorate of the London and Brighton railway, and lived at that seaside resort, he often travelled to town with some distinguished man whom he invited to share his coupé. (Why, I wonder, is this pleasant sort of compartment rarely or never seen nowadays?) More than once the Duke of Richmond was his companion. The time was the mid 'forties, when railway locomotives were far less powerfully built than they are now, and when, London Bridge Terminus being up a rather long incline, it was customary, on the departure of a train from the ticket-taking platform, to employ a second engine to aid the one in front by pushing from behind. The travellers were seated in an end coupé, and opposite their seats were, of course, only the usual glass windows. When, therefore, the Duke for the first time saw the auxiliary engine coming close up against the carriage, he did not know what it meant, turned pale, and showed considerable uneasiness. My father soon assured him that all was right, and then asked why he, a veteran campaigner, was unnerved by a mere railway engine. Whereupon the old soldier laughingly replied that he would far sooner face the foe on the battlefield than sit quietly right in face of the “iron horse.”
[116] Lord Duncannon had been a member of the Commission of Post Office Inquiry of 1835-1838 (already mentioned) which examined Rowland Hill in February 1837. He was at first a strong opponent of the Reform, but during the examination became one of its heartiest supporters. The other two Commissioners were Lord Seymour—who, later, served on Mr Wallace's Select Committee, was afterwards Duke of Somerset, and gave to the world an unorthodox little volume—and Mr Labouchere, afterwards Lord Taunton, and uncle to the better-known proprietor of Truth.
[117] Chap. ii. p. 80. With Lord Brougham and others, my father, some years before, had been associated in the movement for the “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” a Society which, in England and Wales acted as pioneers in the good work of publishing cheap and wholesome literature, just as in Scotland did the Chambers Brothers. Unfortunately, Brougham believed himself to be scientific, and contributed to the series an article so full of mistakes that some wag immediately dubbed the Society that for the “Confusion of Useful,” etc. Brougham was a supporter of the postal reform, and my father found in him more kindliness than the world gave him credit for possessing. The great lawyer was a very eccentric man, and Punch caricatured him unmercifully, invariably representing him as clad in the large-checked “inexpressibles” which he is said to have always worn because, in a moment of weakness, he had purchased as a bargain so huge a roll of cloth of that pattern that it supplied him with those garments for the rest of his days. The story is pretty generally known of his causing to be published the news of his death, and of his sitting, very much alive, in a back room of his darkened house, and reading, with quite pardonable interest, the obituary notices which appeared in the different newspapers. He wrote an execrable hand, which varied in degrees of illegibility. The least illegible he and his secretary alone could read; a worse he only; the very worst, not even he could decipher, especially if he had forgotten the matter of which it treated. This story has, of course, been fathered on many bad writers; but any one possessed of a Brougham autograph must feel convinced that to none but him could possibly belong its authorship.
[118] How much mistaken the old warrior was as regards the soldiers' letters has been abundantly proved. During the first eight months of postal communication between the United Kingdom and our comparatively small army in the Crimea—and long, therefore, before the Board School era—more than 350,000 letters passed each way; while when the Money Order system, for the first time in history, was extended to the seat of war, in one year over £100,000 was sent home for wives and families.
[119] “Life,” i. 352-360.