The History of the Post Office in British North America

by William Smith

To all such, whether the uniform rate they advocated were a penny or higher, the commission addressed themselves, pointing out that the geographical, social and industrial differences between England and the colonies, made it impracticable to base an argument for the one upon the experience of the other.

Uniform penny postage was an immediate success in the United Kingdom because in the United Kingdom there were three thickly-populated countries, with highly developed social and industrial systems. Hill discovered, by a study of the postal statistics laid before the house of commons, that in consequence of the great volume of correspondence exchanged, the comparatively short distances letters were as a rule carried, and the highly developed system of transportation, the average cost of carrying a letter in the United Kingdom did not exceed one farthing. A sum equally small covered the expenses of administration and the maintenance of post offices.

A further discovery of equal importance, which surprised Hill as much as it did anybody, was that the difference in expense between carrying a letter the shortest and the longest possible distances in the kingdom was so small that it could not be expressed in the least valuable coin in use.

In these facts lay the whole case for uniform penny postage. At a penny a letter, there was a clear profit to the post office, and the augmentation in the number of letters as a result of this inducement to correspondence made almost any imaginable profits possible; and the insignificant difference in cost between carrying letters long and short distances, led inevitably to the ideal uniform rate.

The conditions in the British North American colonies were in all respects the reverse of those existing in England. The vast extent of their territories, the sparseness of their populations, and their undeveloped state, socially and industrially, all combined to make the postal system very costly, and the returns meagre; and the great, almost unsettled, stretches between the centres of population made the difference in the cost of conveyance between long and short distances very considerable.

The commission, with such statistics as were available before them, estimated that the average expense of delivering a letter was threepence for conveyance, and twopence-halfpenny for overhead and maintenance charges. These figures showed the impracticability of either low or uniform postage rates, unless the legislatures were willing to take on themselves the yearly deficits, which were certain to occur.

The commission, however, were prepared to recommend considerable reductions in the charges, even though these should result in a noticeable shrinkage in the revenue. Indeed, it seemed to them a distinct advantage that the revenue should be brought down to a point, at which it would no more than meet the expenses. They took it as settled that the British government would adhere to the principle of the imperial bill of 1834, under which the surplus revenues were to be divided among the colonies; and they foresaw serious difficulties among the provinces in dealing with the problem of distributing the surplus.

The rates they recommended—ranging from twopence a letter when the conveyance did not exceed thirty miles up to one shilling for a distance over three hundred miles—were much lower than those charged at that time by the post office.

Dealing with the question of newspaper postage, the commission condemned the impropriety of allowing the sums accruing under this head to pass into the pockets of the deputies of the postmaster general, and recommended that newspapers should be charged at the rate of one-halfpenny each, and that the proceeds should go with the other postage into the treasury.

A point, interesting as illustrating one of the differences of view between ourselves and our grandfathers, was that the commissioners strongly recommended that the prepayment of postage on newspapers should not continue to be compulsory, but that it should be optional whether the sum should be paid by the sender or recipient of the newspaper.