SIR ROWLAND HILL.
The poet Coleridge, on one of his long walks among the English lakes, stopped at a roadside inn for dinner, and while he was there the letter-carrier came in, bringing a letter for the girl who was waiting upon him. The postage was a shilling, nearly twenty-five cents. She looked long and lovingly at the letter, holding it in her hand, and then gave it back to the man, telling him that she could not afford to pay the postage. Coleridge at once offered the shilling, which the girl after much hesitation accepted. When the carrier was gone she told him that he had thrown his shilling away, for the pretended letter was only a blank sheet of paper. On the outside there were some small marks which she had carefully noted before giving the letter back to the carrier. Those marks were the letter, which was from her brother, with whom she had agreed upon a short-hand system by which to communicate news without expense. "We are so poor," said she to the poet, "that we have invented this manner of corresponding and sending our letters free."
The shilling which the postman demanded was, in fact, about a week's wages to a girl in her condition fifty years ago. Nor was it poor girls only who then played tricks upon the post-office. Envelopes franked by honorable members of Parliament were a common article of merchandise, for it was the practice of their clerks and servants to procure and sell them. Indeed, the postal laws were so generally evaded that, in some large towns, the department was cheated of three quarters of its revenue. Who can wonder at it? It cost more then to send a letter from one end of London to the other, or from New York to Harlem, than it now does to send a letter from Egypt to San Francisco. The worst effect of dear postage was the obstacles it placed in the way of correspondence between poor families who were separated by distance. It made correspondence next to impossible between poor people in Europe and their relations in America. Think of an Irish laborer who earned sixpence a day paying seventy-five cents to get news from a daughter in Cincinnati! It required the savings of three or four months.
The man who changed all this, Sir Rowland Hill, died only three years ago at the age of eighty-three. I have often said that an American ought to have invented the new postal system; and Rowland Hill, though born and reared in England, and descended from a long line of English ancestors, was very much an American. He was educated on the American plan. His mind was American, and he had the American way of looking at things with a view to improving them.
His father was a Birmingham schoolmaster, a free trader, and more than half a republican. He brought up his six sons and two daughters to use their minds and their tongues. His eldest son, the recorder of Birmingham, once wrote of his father thus:—
"Perhaps the greatest obligation we owe our father is this: that, from infancy, he would reason with us, and so observe all the rules of fair play, that we put forth our little strength without fear. Arguments were taken at their just weight; the sword of authority was not thrown into the scale."
Miss Edgeworth's tales deeply impressed the boy, and he made up his mind in childhood to follow the path which she recommended, and do something which should greatly benefit mankind.