(2) “Stamped postal letter paper (carta postale bollata) was issued to the public by the Government of the Sardinian States in November 1818; and stamped postal envelopes were issued by the same Government from 1820 till 1836.”
There was no such issue “to the public.” For the purpose of collecting postal duties, “stamped paper or covers of several values, both with embossed and with impressed stamps, appear to have been used in the kingdom of Sardinia about the year 1819.” [153] The use of these stamped covers, etc., was almost entirely limited to one small class of the community, namely the Ministers of State, and was in force from about 1819 to 1821 only. “In March 1836, a formal decree was passed suppressing their further use, the decree being required simply to demonetise a large stock found unused in the Stamp Office at Turin.”[1] The Sardinian experiment, like the earlier one of M. de Valayer in Paris, had but a brief existence, the cause of failure in both cases being apparently attributable to the absence of uniformity of rate.
(3) “Stamped wrappers for newspapers were made experimentally in London by Mr Charles Whiting, under the name of 'go-frees,' in 1830.”
In this country Charles Knight—in as complete ignorance as was my father of M. de Valayer's experiment in the mid-seventeenth century—has always been considered the first to propose the use of stamped covers or wrappers for newspapers; and this he did in 1834, his covers being intended to take the place, as payers of postage, of the duty stamp, when that odious “tax on knowledge” should be abolished. Had it been possible under the old postal system to prepay letter-postage as well as newspaper-postage, what more likely than that a man so far-seeing as was Mr Knight would also have suggested the application of his stamp to all mail matter? Letter postage stamps and prepayment had, of necessity, to await the advent of 1840 and uniformity of rate.[154]
(4) “Finally, and in its results most important of all, the adhesive stamp was made experimentally by Mr James Chalmers in his printing office at Dundee, in 1834.”
An untruth followed by other untruths equally astounding.
Mr Chalmers, when writing of his stamps, has happily supplied refutation of the fraudulent claim set up for him since his own death and that of the postal reformer; and as Mr Chalmers is the person chiefly concerned in that claim, and was a man as honourable as he was public-spirited, his evidence must necessarily be more valuable than that of any other witness. He published his suggestions as to postal reform, etc., in full, with his name and address added, in the Post Circular[155] of 5th April 1838, his paper being dated 8th February of the same year. Specimens of his stamps accompanied his communication; and in a reprint of this paper made in 1839 he claimed November 1837 as the date of his “first” experiments in stamp-making—the italics being his own. In none of his writings is there mention of any earlier experiments; neither is allusion made to any such in the numerously-signed “certificate” addressed by his fellow-citizens of Dundee to the Treasury in September 1839. The certificate eulogises Mr Chalmers' valuable public services, speaks of his successful efforts in 1825 to establish a 48 hours' acceleration of the mail-coaches plying between Dundee and London, and recommends to “My Lords” the adoption of the accompanying “slips” proposed by him. But nowhere in the certificate is reference made to the mythical stamps declared, nearly half a century later, to have been made in 1834. Yet some of these over one hundred signatories must have been among the friends who, according to the fable, visited Mr Chalmers' printing office in that year to inspect those early stamps. An extraordinary instance of wholesale forgetfulness if the stamps had had actual existence.[156] The “slips” made “first” in November 1837 were narrow pieces of paper of which one end bore the printed stamp, while the other end was to be slipped under the envelope flap—a clumsy device, entailing probable divorce between envelope and “slip” during their passage through the post. The fatal objection to all his stamps was that they were type-set, thereby making forgery easy. In every case the stamps bear the face-value proposed by Rowland Hill in his plan of reform—a penny the half, and twopence the whole ounce. Not only did Mr Chalmers not invent the stamp, adhesive or otherwise, but of the former he disapproved on the ground of the then supposed difficulty of gumming large sheets of paper.[157]
It may be added that copies of the Post Circular figure in the “Cole Bequest” to the South Kensington Museum; and if a very necessary caution addressed to the custodians there while the Chalmers claim was being rather hotly urged has received due attention, those documents should still be in the Museum, unimpeachable witnesses to the truth.
This claim to priority of invention, or of publication of invention, of the stamps which, with culpable carelessness, obtained recognition in the pages of the “Encyclopædia Britannica” has no foundation in fact. The writer of the article on the Post Office in “Chambers's Encyclopædia,” ix. 677 (edition 1901), is far better informed on the subject of which he treats, though even he says that “Both” [men] “seem to have hit on the plan independently; but,” he adds, with true discernment of the weakest feature of the claim, “the use of adhesive postage stamps, without uniform rates, and at a time when the practice of sending letters unpaid was almost universal, would obviously have been impossible.”
This impossibility has already been demonstrated in the present work in the chapter on “The Old System.” The simple explanation of the cause which prompted Mr Chalmers, late in 1837, to make designs for the stamps is not far to seek. At some time during the intervening months he had read “Post Office Reform,”[158] opened up a correspondence with its author—till then an entire stranger—and joined the ranks of those who were helping on the reform. It is a pity that in the attempt to fix upon this public-spirited man credit for an invention which was not his, the good work he actually accomplished should be frequently lost sight of.