The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

Stayner in his rejoinder defended himself with vigour and success against the imputations of his colleagues, and retorted upon Dowling, the chairman, with charges of unfairness and studied discourtesy towards himself. The bearing of Dowling was so offensive that Stayner was with difficulty restrained from severing his relations with the commission.

The remedies proposed by the commission for the two cardinal defects to which they had drawn attention, were simple and efficacious. They would place the whole colonial postal system in the hands of a single deputy postmaster general, who should own responsibility, not only to his official superior in England, but also, in all points which did not conflict with his primary duty, to the executive heads of the several provinces, so far as related to the parts of the system within their respective jurisdictions.

The headquarters of the deputy postmaster general, the commission urged, should be at the capital of the province of Canada, and he should be under the orders of the governor general. The authority of the deputy postmaster general in the other provinces should be vested in local inspectors, whose relations with the lieutenant governors were to be identical with those which should subsist between the deputy postmaster general and the governor general.

In cases occurring in the other provinces, which appeared to transcend the powers of the local inspectors, the lieutenant governors might correspond with the governor general, and the inspectors with the deputy. Stayner objected to the plan proposed, in so far as it took the appointments to postmasterships and other offices out of the hands of the representative of the postmaster general, and made them the subject of political patronage.

Having disposed of the questions relating to the organization and administration of the department, the commissioners proceeded to discuss matters bearing upon its operations.

The first of these was the rates of postage. In dealing with this subject the commission had before them a mass of evidence from all parts of the colonies, which convinced them that the great bulk of the letters exchanged, did not pass through the post office. It was asserted by responsible persons that, in some parts of the country, scarcely ten per cent. of the letters written were conveyed by the post office, and in few cases was the estimate of letters carried by private means less than fifty per cent.

Though various other reasons were given for this systematic evasion of the only lawful means of conveying letters—the infrequency of the couriers' services, and the public distrust in the security of the mails—there was practical unanimity in the declaration that the chief obstacle in the way of the public's using the post office was the excessive rates of postage.

The commission found that there was a strong sentiment among their correspondents, favouring the adoption of the system then recently introduced into England by the genius of Rowland Hill. Until 1840, the postal rates in England were substantially the same as those which hampered the post office in the colonies; and the general avoidance of the post office by the merchants and other writers of letters in that country was as marked as it was in Canada.

Richard Cobden declared that not one-sixth of the letters exchanged in England were transmitted through the post office, and other observers of equal authority bore similar emphatic testimony. The displacement of the complicated system of charges based on the number of enclosures and the distance the letters were carried, and the adoption of a penny rate carrying letters to all parts of the United Kingdom, immediately turned all the streams of correspondence into the channels of the post office. Not only were the private letter-carrying agencies put out of business, but the low, easily comprehended rate called into existence a vast body of new correspondence.

Few people in Canada believed in the possibility of a rate as low as a penny for the Canadian post office, but many were attracted by the fascination of a uniform charge even though it should be higher than that, which was so vastly augmenting correspondence in England.