Meanwhile, there had appeared in the “Quarterly Review” an elaborate attack, said to have been written by Mr. Croker, on my whole plan and all its supporters; the Mercantile Committee, the Parliamentary Committee, the witnesses, and, above all, the Government, receiving each a share of the reproaches which fell primarily upon myself. A few extracts from this article may still interest or amuse my readers.
It contains one statement of some importance, which, had I recollected it at the proper time, would have been useful in a recent discussion as to the origin of postage stamps:—
“M. Piron tells us that the idea of a post-paid envelope originated early in the reign of Louis XIV. with M. de Valayer, who, in 1653, established (with royal approbation) a private penny post, placing boxes at the corners of the streets for the reception of letters wrapped up in envelopes, which were to be bought at offices established for that purpose....
“But this device had long been forgotten even in France; and we have no doubt that when Mr. Charles Knight, an extensive publisher as well as an intelligent literary man, proposed, some years since, a stamped cover for the circulation of newspapers, he was under no obligation for the idea to Monsieur de Valayer. Mr. Hill, adopting Mr. Knight’s suggestion, has applied it to the general purposes of the Post Office with an ingenuity and address which make it his own.”[284]
My statement that the Post Office revenue had remained stationary during the twenty years preceding the writing of my pamphlet is pronounced by the writer to be completely overthrown by the fact that the Post Office revenue had doubled during the fifteen years preceding that period.[285]
Expectation of moral benefits from low postage is thus met:—
“On the whole we feel that, so far from the exclusive benefits to ‘order, morals, and religion’ which Mr. Hill and the committee put forward, there is, at least, as great a chance of the contrary mischief, and that the proposed penny post might perhaps be more justly characterised as ‘sedition made easy.’”[286]
The reader of the present day, whom dire necessity has accustomed to modern hardships, will be roused to a sense of his condition by learning that “prepayment by means of a stamp or stamped cover is universally admitted to be quite the reverse of convenient, foreign to the habits of the people,”[287] &c.
The attack was answered in the next number of the “Edinburgh Review” in an article written by my eldest brother, which thus concludes:—
“Let, then, any temporary diminution of income be regarded as an outlay. It would be but slight considered with reference to the objects in view, and yet all that is demanded for the mightiest social improvement ever attempted at a single effort. Suppose even an average yearly loss of a million for ten years. It is but half what the country has paid for the abolition of slavery, without the possibility of any money return. Treat the deficit as an outlay of capital, and those who make a serious affair of it suppose that a great nation is to shrink from a financial operation which a joint-stock company would laugh at. But enough of revenue. Even if the hope of ultimate profit should altogether fail, let us recur to a substituted tax; and if we are asked, What tax? we shall answer, Any tax you please—certain that none can operate so fatally on all other sources of revenue as this. Letters are the primordia rerum of the commercial world. To tax them at all, is condemned by those who are best acquainted with the operations of finances. Surely, then, cent. per cent. will hardly be deemed too slight a burden, and yet that—nay, more than that—the new plan will yield.