“During the advent year of penny postage, the commission on Post Office orders was reduced to threepence and sixpence for sums not exceeding two pounds and not exceeding five pounds respectively. In that year the number of orders granted in the United Kingdom was (in round numbers, which we shall use throughout, for the reader’s greater convenience) 188,000, for an aggregate amount of £313,000. Even this was a great advance on the business previously done at the old prices; but what are the figures for the tenth year of penny postage? During the year 1850 the number of orders granted in the United Kingdom was 4,440,000, for amounts making up £8,495,000; only a million less than the yearly produce of the income and assessed taxes put together! This marvellous increase can perhaps be better appreciated by being seen through a diminished medium. In the first month of the penny postage (1840), the issue of orders was about 10,000 in number, for something over £16,000; but in the month of December, 1851, the number of orders issued was more than 367,000, for £690,000. That is to say, during that single month twice as many orders were taken out and paid for than were issued and paid in 1840 during the whole year.
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“The Central Money Order Office in which these remarkable results have been produced and ascertained is in Aldersgate Street, London, hard by the Post Office. It is a large establishment—large enough to be a very considerable post office in itself—with extensive cellarage branching off into interminable groves of letters of advice and receipts, all methodically arranged for reference. The room in which the orders are issued and paid has a flavour of Lombard Street and money. It has its long banker’s counter, where clerks sit behind iron gratings, with their wooden bowls of cash, and their little scales for weighing gold; and vistas of pigeon-holes stretch out behind them—which are not without their pigeons, as we shall presently see. Here, from ten o’clock to four, keeping the swing doors on the swing all day, all sorts and conditions of people come and go. Greasy butchers and salesmen from Newgate Market, with bits of suet in their hair, who loll, and lounge, and cool their foreheads against the grating, like a good-humoured sort of bears; sharp little clerks not long from school, who have everything requisite and necessary in readiness; older clerks in shooting coats, a little sobered down as to official zeal, though possibly not yet as to cigar divans and betting offices; matrons who will go distractedly wrong, and whom no consideration, human or divine, will induce to declare in plain words what they have come for; people with small children, which they perch on edges of remote desks, where the children, supposing themselves to be for ever abandoned and lost, present a piteous spectacle; labouring men, merchants, half-pay officers, retired old gentlemen from trim gardens by the New River, excessively impatient of being trodden on, and very persistent as to the poking in of their written demands with tops of canes and handles of umbrellas. The clerks in this office ought to rival the lamented Sir Charles Bell in their knowledge of the expression of the hand. The varieties of hands that hover about the grating, and are thrust through the little doorways in it, are a continual study for them—or would be, if they had any time to spare, which assuredly they have not. The coarse-grained hand which seems all thumb and knuckle, and no nail, and which takes up money or puts it down with such an odd, clumsy, lumbering touch; the retail trader’s hand, which chinks it up and tosses it over with a bounce; the housewife’s hand, which has a lingering propensity to keep some of it back, and to drive a bargain by not paying in the last shilling or so of the sum for which her order is obtained; the quick, the slow, the coarse, the fine, the sensitive and dull, the ready and unready—they are always at the grating all day long. Hovering behind the owners of these hands, observant of the various transactions in which they engage, is a tall constable (rather potential with the matrons and widows on account of his portly aspect), who assists the bewildered female public, explains the nature of the printed forms put ready to be filled up for the quicker issuing of orders and the greater exactness as to names, and has an eye on the unready one, as he knots his money up in a pocket-handkerchief or crams it into a greasy pocket-book. If you have any bad money by you, be careful not to bring it here. The portly constable will whisk you into a back office before you can say Jack Robinson, will snip your bad half-crown or five-shilling piece in half directly, and (at the best), after searching inquiry, will fold the pieces in a note of your name and address, and consign them to a bundle of similar trophies for evermore.
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“This sort of mystification is even more surprising than that under which certain uneducated individuals (Irish) have been known to labour. The belief has more than once been manifested at a money order office window that the mere payment of the commission would be sufficient to procure an order for five pounds; the form of paying in the five pounds being deemed purely optional. An Irish gentleman (who had left his hod at the door) recently applied in Aldersgate Street for an order for five pounds on a Tipperary post office; for which he tendered (probably congratulating himself on having hit upon so good an investment) sixpence. It required a lengthened argument to prove to him that he would have to pay the five pounds into the office before his friend could receive that small amount in Tipperary; and he went away, after all, evidently convinced that his not having this order was one of the personal wrongs of Ireland, and one of the particular injustices done to hereditary bondsmen only.
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“Despite the prodigious increase in the business of the department which we have pointed out, its efficiency has been doubled, and its cost almost halved. By superseding seventy-eight superfluous ledgers, the labour of sixty clerks has been saved; by simply reducing the size of the money orders and advices, the expense of paper and print alone has been diminished by £1,100 per annum; while the abolition of separate advices of each transaction has economised the number of letters by 46,000 weekly. The upshot is, that these economical reforms have effected a saving in the Money Order Office alone equal to £17,000 per annum.”
As a supplement to the foregoing extracts I quote from my Journal the following statistical record:—
“June 7th, 1853.—The accounts of the Money Order Office for 1852 show an increase of profit of £4,227, making a total for the year of £11,664. In 1847, when I took to the department, there was a loss of £10,600 a year; so that the effective saving is upwards of £22,000 a year.”
GENERAL ECONOMIC MEASURES.