"He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
News from all nations lumb'ring at his back,—
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks;
Births, deaths, and marriages; epistles wet
With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods of his fluent quill;
Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains,
Or nymphs responsive."
Cowper.
The growth of the postal system is a sure measure of the progress of industry, commerce, education, and all that goes to make up the sum of civilization; and there is no more striking illustration to be found of the strides which our country has made in that direction since the century began than the introduction of a cheap and rapid delivery of letters, and the craving which it has at once satisfied and augmented. Nothing gives us so forcible an idea of the difference between the Britain of the present day and the Britain of the Stuart or even of the Georgian period, than the contrast between the postal communication of these times and of our own. The itch of writing is now so strong in us, we are so constantly writing or receiving letters, our appetite for them is so ravenous, that we wonder how people got on in the days when the postman was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when even majesty was so badly served that, as one old postmaster[D] wrote in self-exculpation of some delay, "when placards are sent (to order the immediate forwarding of some state despatches) the constables many times be fayne to take the horses oute of plowes and cartes, wherein," he gravely adds, "can be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that the country was going ahead when Cromwell (1656) found it worth while to establish posts for the people at large, and was able to farm out the post office for £10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment were doubled by the time the Stuarts returned to the throne, and more than doubled again before the close of the seventeenth century. The country has kept on growing out of system after system, like a lad out of his clothes, and at different times has had new ones made to its measure. Brian Tuke's easy plan of borrowing farmers' horses on which to mount his emissaries, gave place to regular relays of post-boys and post-horses; and, in course of time, when the robbery of the mails by sturdy highwaymen had become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by a system of stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed guard. This was thought a great advance; and so it was. A pushing, zealous man named Palmer originated the scheme. Amidst many other avocations, he found time to travel on the outside of stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coachmen and observing the routes, here, there, and everywhere all over England, and thus matured all the details of his plan from personal experience. "None but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of admiration in the House of Commons, "could have conceived, none but an enthusiast could have practically entertained, none but an enthusiast could have carried out such a system."
Still, in spite of the exactitude with which Palmer's scheme was declared to fit the wants of the country, it soon began to be grown out of like the rest. It became too short, too tight, too straitened every way, and impeded the circulation of correspondence,—no unimportant artery of our national system. The cost of postage was too high, the mode of delivery too slow, and the consequence was, that people either repressed their desire to write letters, or sent them through some cheaper and illegitimate channel. Sir Walter Scott knew a man who recollected the mail from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single letter. Of all the tens of thousands of the modern Babylon, only one solitary individual had got anything to say to anybody in the metropolis of the sister kingdom worth paying postage for. "We look back now," writes Miss Martineau, "with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading times, 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 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. But, till a dozen years ago, it did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest class in our own country. The fact is, there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except between those who had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage 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 multitudes of the lower orders who suffered like the crusading families of old, and the geographical discoverers of all times. When once their families parted off from home it was a separation 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 if seas or deserts lay between them and home. If the shilling for each letter could be saved by the economy of weeks or months at first, the rarity of correspondence went on to increase the rarity; new interests hastened the dying out of old ones; and the ancient domestic affections were but too apt to wither away, till the wish for intercourse was gone. The young girl could not ease her heart by pouring out her cares and difficulties to her mother before she slept, as she can now, when the penny and the sheet of paper are the only condition of the correspondence. The young lad felt that a letter home was a serious and formal matter, when it must cost his parents more than any indulgence they ever thought of for themselves; and the old fun and light-heartedness were dropped off from such domestic intercourse as there was. The effect upon the morals of this kind of restraint is proved beyond a doubt by the evidence afforded in the army. It was a well-known fact, that in regiments where the commanding officer was kind and courteous about franking letters for the privates, and encouraged them to write as often as they pleased, the soldiers were more sober and manly, more virtuous and domestic in their affections, than where difficulty was made by the indolence or stiffness of the franking officer."
Under the costly postal system, the revenue of the post office did not, as it had hitherto done, and should have continued to do, keep pace with the progress of the country. The appetite for communication between distant friends or men of business was evidently either decaying, or finding vent in an unlawful way. The latter was chiefly the case. There were vast numbers of people separated from each other by long weary miles, too many to permit of visits, who could not resist writing to each other,—the doating parent to the child, the lover to his mistress, the merchant to his agents, the lawyer to his clients. Those who could not afford postage, were the very class who could not get franks; for the principle was, that those who could best afford postage money should have plenty of franks, which were, of course, quite out of the way of poor, humble folks,—the fat sow had his ear well greased, the lean, starving one had to consume his own fat, like the bear, or go without. The consequence was, that those who were eager to write and could not get letters through the post, found other means of forwarding them to the evasion of the law. There was no limit to the exercise of ingenuity in this direction. Three or four letters were written on one piece of paper, to be cut up and distributed separately by one of the recipients; newspapers were turned into letters by underscoring or pricking with a pin the letters required to form the various words of the communication; some peculiarity in the style of address on the outside was arranged between correspondents, the sight of which was enough to indicate a message, and the letter was then rejected, having served its purpose; and so on, in a hundred other ways, fraudulent means were found of evading the law. Some carriers had a large and profitable business in smuggling letters. In many populous districts the number of letters conveyed by carriers at a penny each in an illegal way far exceeded those sent through the post. In Manchester, for every letter that went by the postman, six went by the carrier; and in Glasgow the proportion was as one to ten. All this was notorious. The most honourable people saw no great harm in cheating the post to send a word of comfort or encouragement to an absent friend,—it was a vice that leaned to virtue's side. But it was a bad thing for the country that people should be driven to such devices, in obeying a natural and proper impulse. The man who began by smuggling letters, might end by smuggling tobacco or brandy; and the system was morally pernicious. All felt the evil, but remedy seemed impossible. As the urgency for a change grew to a head, the man came to effect it,—a man "of open heart, who could enter into family impulses; a man of philosophical ingenuity, who could devise a remedial scheme; a man of business, who could fortify such a scheme with impregnable accuracy"—that man was Rowland Hill.
When quite a young man, on a pedestrian excursion through the lake district, Rowland Hill, passing a cottage door, observed the postman deliver a letter to a woman, and overheard her, after looking anxiously at the envelope, and then returning it, say she had no money to pay the postage. The man was about to put it back in his wallet and pass on, for it was an every-day thing for him to receive such a reply from the poor countryfolk, when Mr. Hill in his goodness of heart, out of compassion for the woman, stepped forward and paid the shilling, regardless of many shakes of the head, and hints of remonstrance from her, which he interpreted as merely unwillingness to trespass on a stranger's bounty. As soon as the postman was out of sight she broke the seal, and showed him why she did not want him to pay for the letter. The sheet was a blank, and the envelope had served as a means of communication between her and her correspondent. It appeared that she had arranged with her brother, that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in that way once a quarter, and thus she had tidings of him without paying the postage.
As he pursued his walk, Mr. Hill could not help meditating on the incident, which had made a deep impression on his mind. He could not blame the poor woman and her brother for the trick they had played upon the post office in order to correspond with each other; and yet he felt there must be something wrong in a system which put it out of their reach, and of others similarly circumstanced, to do so in a lawful manner. Every country post-master had a budget of touching stories of poor folk who were tantalized with the sight of a letter from some dear one, full, perhaps, of kind words and cheering news, or asking sympathy and condolence in misfortune, or transmitting money to help them in their straits; as well as of countless little frauds of the sort described, which they could not always harden themselves to circumvent and punish, so piteously eager did the poor souls appear to be to get word of their friends. And yet, in spite of all sorts of frauds, to people in humble life letters came like "angels' visits, few and far between."
Mr. Hill asked himself whether there was no means of lessening the cost of postage, whether the government could not afford to charge a lower rate, or manage to get the work done more cheaply? Keeping his ears and eyes open, always on the alert to pick up a fact as regarded the present, or a hint for the future, examining the mode of carriage and delivery, the routes chosen, and the time occupied, Mr. Hill, after a while, arrived at the conviction, that the postage rates might not only be reduced, but that the transmission of letters might be more quickly performed by a remodelling of the system. He ascertained that the cost of mere transit incurred upon a letter sent from London to Edinburgh, a distance of 400 miles, was not more than a thirty-sixth part of a penny, and that, therefore, there was a margin, under the existing charge, of 11-35/36d. for extra expenses and profit. He observed that the twopenny posts of London and other large towns were found to answer very well, although people, being within easy distances of each other, did not need so much as in the country to correspond in writing, and that the carriers, in spite of the illegality of the traffic, had loads of letters to deliver at a penny each, and that penny paid them for their trouble, as well as their risk of detection. He therefore came to the conclusion, that what was wanted, and what it was quite possible to establish, was a uniform penny postage rate over the whole of the United Kingdom. He calculated that if that were adopted, the number of people then in the habit of writing letters would write a great many more than ever; that others, who had been precluded by the expense from corresponding, would come into the field; and that hundreds of letters forwarded illegally would now pass through the post, so that the number of letters sent by post would be increased fourfold, and the revenue, at first, perhaps a trifle curtailed, would soon mount up again.