Meanwhile the Parliamentary Committee, appointed on the motion of Mr. Wallace, began its sittings. Mr. Wallace, being appointed chairman, thenceforth concentrated his indefatigable efforts upon its work; and his labour during the whole session—his duties being by no means confined to the formal sittings—was most severe.
The committee sat no less than sixty-three days. They examined “the Postmaster-General, the secretaries and the solicitors of the three Post Offices of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and other officers of the Post Office department; obtained many important returns from the Post Office, most of which they directed to be prepared expressly for their use; and also examined the chairman, secretary, and solicitor of the Board of Stamps and Taxes, Mr. Rowland Hill, and eighty-three other witnesses, of various occupations, professions, and trades, from various parts of the kingdom; in the selection of which they were much assisted by an association of bankers and merchants in London, formed expressly to aid the committee in the prosecution of their inquiry.”[153] This association was the committee formed by Mr. Moffatt.
The committee wisely directed its attention chiefly to the question of inland postage, which indeed offered abundant matter for investigation.
In speaking of the evidence given before this committee, I follow not the order in which it was given, but the classification observed in the final Report; selecting, as the Report does, only those portions which bear most strongly on the questions to be resolved. My own evidence I shall in the main pass over, seeing that it was in substance almost identical with my pamphlet. My plan of “secondary distribution,”[154] however, I now thought it expedient to abandon, so far as regarded the existing range of post office operations, not from any doubt of its justice or intrinsic advantage, but with a view to simplify the great question before the committee.[155]
One question, of course, related to the varying rates of postage, which any one accustomed to present simplicity would find sufficiently perplexing. In Great Britain (for in Ireland it was somewhat different) the postage on a single letter delivered within eight miles of the office where it was posted was, as a general rule—consequent on a recent reduction—twopence, the lowest rate beyond that limit being fourpence. Beyond fifteen miles it became fivepence; after which it rose a penny at a time, but by irregular augmentation, to one shilling, the charge for three hundred miles; one penny more served for four hundred miles, and thenceforward augmentation went on at the same rate, each additional penny serving for another hundred miles. This plan of charge, with various complications arising out of it, produced remarkable anomalies.
As if this complexity were not quite enough, there was as a general rule an additional charge of a half-penny on a letter crossing the Scotch border; while letters to or from Ireland had to bear, in addition, packet rates, and rates for crossing the bridges over the Conway and the Menai; or, if they took the southern route, a rate chargeable at Milford.[156] Lastly, there was the rule already mentioned, by which a letter with the slightest enclosure incurred double postage, and with two enclosures triple; the postage, however, being regulated by weight whenever this reached an ounce, at which point the charge became quadruple; rising afterwards by a single postage for every additional quarter of an ounce.[157] Surely it is no wonder that Post Office officials, viewing prepayment in connection with such whimsical complexity, and probably thinking the connection indissoluble, should be hopeless of inducing the public to adopt the practice.
A second inquiry, which occupied much attention, referred to the number of chargeable letters then passing annually through the Office. The importance of this question, which no longer appears at first sight, was then so great that it was regarded as one of the main points at issue between the Post Office and myself.
Its importance arose thus. To estimate the increase in correspondence required for my purpose, it was obviously necessary to know the amount of loss per letter involved in the proposed reduction of postage; in other words, the difference between the proposed rate and the average of the rates actually paid, which average had therefore to be arrived at. This I placed at sixpence farthing, the Post Office authorities at a shilling. Actual knowledge, however, did not exist, and each party had resorted to calculation, dividing the gross revenue by the supposed number of letters. That number I then estimated at eighty-eight millions,[158] the Post Office authoritatively declared it to be only forty-two or forty-three millions;[159] hence the difference in our results as to the actual average of postage, and consequently as to the required increase in correspondence, which I fixed at five-and-a-quarter-fold, the Post Office at twelve-fold.
Of course it would have been easy for the Post Office authorities to correct their calculation, before the appointment of the committee, by an actual counting of letters; nor have I ever learned why this corrective was not applied. I had indeed to thank the department for obligingly supplying me with a fact essential to my calculation, viz., the number of letters, general and local, delivered in London in one week; and had this fact been dealt with by the Post Office as I myself dealt with it (a process, however, pronounced incorrect by the office),[160] the same result, or nearly so, must have been arrived at by both parties; but, as already intimated, had the counting process been applied to the whole country, as was afterwards done on the requisition of the committee, the whole question would have been settled at once.