The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the History of Penny Postage, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Sir Rowland Hill; George Birkbeck Norman Hill

“Rowland Hill, Esq.”

Probably Mr. Cobden, in this letter, referred merely to the great facility given by cheap postage for the transmission and circulation of those papers which played so material a part in the Anti-Corn Law agitation; but it seems not unlikely that other assistance may have been afforded to his great improvement by the success, so far as then ascertained, of my measure, as a bold reduction of taxation—a change much more sudden and decided than had ever before taken place in our fiscal system. I believe I am safe in assuming that this success has acted as an encouragement to the many adventurous changes in taxation which have followed one another in rapid succession even to the present time.

Among the many minor evidences to the benefit derived from cheap postage, the following little circumstance was not the least pleasing. The late Mr. Tremenheere told me that a servant-boy in his father’s house in London, learning that his mother in Somersetshire was dangerously ill, wrote home for a daily bulletin, which he duly received until the danger was over, eagerly rushing every morning to the door at the first sound of the postman’s knock. Such an occurrence would seem trivial now; it was felt then as a striking novelty.

The formal presentation of the Testimonial took place at Blackwall on June the 17th, 1846, a public dinner being given on the occasion. Of my own family there were present my father (then in his eighty-fourth year), all my brothers, my brother-in-law, and my only son. The chair was taken by Mr. Warburton. A report was read by the secretary of the Testimonial Committee, from which it appeared that the net amount of the subscription was upwards of £13,000. The committee expressed its opinion that the amount would have been larger had not individual subscriptions been limited at the outset to £10 10s. The report also, contrasting the testimony from the Treasury to the value of my services with the fact of my dismissal, urged my recall. The chairman took occasion in the speech, in which he proposed my health, to point out that among the subscribers to the Testimonial Fund was to be reckoned the First Lord of the Treasury, Sir Robert Peel.

In my reply, after expressing my thanks, and speaking of the public services of those who had assisted in the great work of postal reform, I proceeded to a short review of the principal results of penny postage up to that time. I showed that, even with the very limited adoption of my plan, considerable progress had been made towards the recovery of the revenue and that large multiplication of letters on which I had counted; the number of letters delivered within twelve miles of St Martin’s-le-Grand being already equal to that delivered under the old system throughout the whole United Kingdom. I next touched upon those yet more important benefits which could not be exhibited in a statistical form; and upon this point I was happily able to quote from a recent speech of Mr. Goulburn, made on the bringing-in of his Budget, the passage being as follows:—

“It would be a fallacy to suppose that the country is only relieved by a remission of taxation to the amount of the loss experienced by the Exchequer. Nothing can be more erroneous. When you reduce a tax you should calculate the amount of relief afforded upon the increased consumption of that article; you cannot take as a measure of the relief of the pressure upon the people the amount which you collect less in the revenue.”

Now, by applying this rule to the determination of the amount of relief afforded by the reduction of the postage rates, even taking such reduction at only fivepence per letter, it would appear that the total benefit amounted to the enormous sum of £6,000,000 per annum.[30]

Having thus dealt with the past and present, I proceeded to speak of the future; and here I turned again to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as a judge certainly free from all suspicion of undue leaning towards penny postage, for an opinion as to the results to be expected from those improvements for which I had so strenuously contended. In the same speech he anticipated “that the revenue of the Post Office, as additional facilities are given, will continue to present a large annual increase”; and further on he estimated the net postal revenue for the current year at £850,000. I was able, even then, truly to add—and I may observe in passing, that this remark has since that time been frequently repeated by others—that there was no branch of the revenue the increase of which was so steady and rapid as the revenue of the Post Office. I pointed out that, as education became more and more extended, a large increase of correspondence, and consequently of revenue, might be confidently expected; the more so because, great as the actual amount appeared when viewed in the aggregate, the average yielded by its division amongst the whole population was but one letter per month for each person; while if the time should ever come when the average postage of the country would equal that given by the domestic correspondence of my own family, including children and servants, the annual gross revenue of the Post Office would amount to more than £40,000,000—or twentyfold its actual sum.

But if the present imperfect arrangements afforded such results as those which had actually been realized, what would be the effect of adopting the whole plan? Little had been done towards this during the last three years, but the Post Office had reluctantly made at least one valuable move. It had established new deliveries in London to the extent, if not of six, as recommended by myself, yet to that of three. The effect was immediately to advance the annual rate of increase in the number of district letters by 50 per cent. This improvement had not been followed by that earlier delivery of the general post letters which I had offered to effect without any material addition to expense, but such an acceleration the Post Office had declared impossible.

In the department of economy, however, much remained to be effected, and that not by a reduction of salaries, nor by increasing the labours of the men, but by simplifying the mechanism of the Post Office. I added that, seeing how much room there was for further improvement, and yet how near the results actually obtained approached to those anticipated from the complete development of the plan, I thought we were fully justified in assuming that, but for the unfortunate interruption in the progress of the measure which took place on the retirement of the Liberal Government, there would ere this have been no exception whatever to the realization of our anticipations.