Not less important was it to obtain prompt and complete accounts. One desideratum was a complete registration of papers, the necessity for which happened to be exemplified in the midst of my arrangements on the subject by the discovery, in the desk of the late chief clerk at a town in Yorkshire, of more than forty unanswered letters from the chief office, some of them already six months old. Money-order accounts in the London office, too, I found in great disorder; arrears so long as, in the opinion of the head of the department, would require for bringing them up a force of thirty-five men for four years; in other words, an outlay of at least £10,000, with a doubt whether even then the outstanding money orders could be correctly ascertained. To avoid so great an outlay, I suggested an Act of Parliament protecting the department, after due notice, from legal claims on orders issued before 1847. This course was in the end adopted, though the practice was still to discharge any claim which appeared to be just; nor do I remember that the restriction ever led to complaint.
At the same time there was prospect of great economy:—
“February 16th, 1848.—Jackson now thinks that other improvements now in progress will enable the Money Order Office to undertake all the additional work likely to arise in the next two or three years, including the extension of the system throughout England and Wales, without any increased force. If so, the effective saving will be enormous.”
It may be added that this expectation was confirmed by the event.
“March 8th, 1848.—The Postmaster-General, in speaking of the many improvements which I have effected, remarked the singular absence of all complaints from the public, though some [of the improvements] are more or less restrictive.”
Among the means formerly taken to account for the existence of a revenue under what it regarded as the ruinous system of penny postage, the Post Office had uniformly maintained that a large profit was obtained in the Money Order Department. A return now made to Parliament showed that, so far from this being the case, the expenditure of the previous year, the last before that department came under my control, exceeded the receipts by about £10,000.
A summary of the improvements effected thus far in this department will be found in a letter addressed by me to the Postmaster-General on January 3rd, 1849, which is given in the [Appendix].
Some incidents of the years 1847 and 1848, which for convenience I have hitherto omitted, are yet worthy of record:—
Carelessness in Remittance.
“May 27th, 1847.—Mr. Ramsey (missing-letter clerk) brought me a packet containing whole bank-notes to the amount of £1500, so carelessly made up that they had all slipped out; and to add to the carelessness the packet was imperfectly addressed to some country house in Herefordshire, no post town being named. It had found its way, after much delay, into the post office at Ross, and had been sent to London by the postmistress. Instances of such carelessness are not infrequent.”