CHAPTER XIV.

NATIONAL TESTIMONIAL (1844-46).

Of one motive to retirement from more active railway duties I have not yet spoken: it was supplied by the generosity of the public, as will appear hereafter. I first return to transactions connected with the Post Office, from which attention has been withdrawn by the above narrative. Of such limited progress, however, as was made towards the adoption of my plans, I shall speak more conveniently when the period of my exclusion approaches its close.

I had the high gratification to learn that the leading feature of my plan had been introduced to some extent into the United States, and that the President had announced to Congress his desire to reduce the postage throughout the Union; a measure carried into effect in the spring of 1845, when the postage was fixed at five cents (twopence-halfpenny) for distances within three hundred miles, and ten cents between places more remote. At home, however, the Liberal party wisely judged that the time for further parliamentary action on the subject of postal reform was not yet come, though occasional motions on postal affairs showed that the question did not altogether sleep.

Meantime, an occurrence took place which brought postal affairs, on a point of much importance, repeatedly before Parliament and the country. This was the opening of letters to and from Signor Mazzini and other Italian exiles, by authority of the Secretary of State for Home Affairs, from whose name such practices were for a time termed "Grahamizing," though, in truth, Sir James Graham was by no means their originator. The unhappy consequences, however, in this particular instance, raised so strong a feeling of indignation against the individual minister, as in great measure to withdraw public attention from the precedent pleaded in his defence. There were two debates on the subject in each House in June, 1844, and these were followed by many further discussions, ending in each House by the grant of a committee of inquiry, each of which made its Report in the following August. In that of the Lords alone there is reference, and that I think somewhat obscure, to what, as I afterwards learned, was a regular practice at the Post Office, though for it the Post Office authorities were nowise responsible. Incredible as it may appear to my readers, it is nevertheless true that so late as 1844 a system, dating from some far distant time, was in full operation, under which clerks from the Foreign Office used to attend on the arrival of mails from abroad, to open the letters addressed to certain ministers resident in England, and make from them such extracts as they deemed useful for the service of Government. Happily, the feeling manifested on this occasion led to the entire abandonment of this most questionable expedient; though it must be recorded that a motion made by Mr. Duncombe, on April 9th, 1845, to forbid the further opening of letters under any circumstances, was lost, the House apparently holding that there were circumstances which might render such an expedient just and necessary. I may remark, however, that in the ten years during which I had opportunity for direct knowledge on the subject, it was never resorted to except in a very few cases relating, so far as I can recollect, exclusively to burglars, and others of that stamp.

I cannot close this portion of my narrative without mentioning one small but curious incident. In May, 1845, I received a letter from my friend Dr. Henderson, informing me that there was a tract in the British Museum, dated as far back as 1659, and entitled "A Penny Post," the author of which bore my own surname. On application to my friend Dr. Gray, I received, through his kindness, a manuscript copy of the same, which is still in my possession. The title is as follows:--"A Penny Post, or a Vindication of the Liberty and Birthright of every Englishman in Carrying Merchants' and other Men's Letters, against any Restraint of Farmers of such Employments. By John Hill, 1659."[29]

I now come to a proceeding of no small importance to myself, whether regarded as an attestation of my services, or as an augmentation of my means. In March, 1844, the Mercantile Committee, so frequently mentioned in this narrative, issued an advertisement inviting subscriptions to a testimonial in my favour. Generally speaking, I was most properly left uninformed as to details; but in December of the same year I received a letter from Mr. Estlin, an eminent surgeon of Bristol, giving an account of proceedings in that important city anterior to any movement in London; and, in point of fact, I believe it was in Bristol, and from Mr. Estlin, that the testimonial had its origin. I may add that, so far as I am aware, the first London paper in which the measure was advocated was one in which I believe Mr. Estlin may have had some influence. It was a paper of limited circulation, called _The Inquirer_, and I was informed that the article in question was from the pen of the editor, the Rev. William Hincks. Neither of these gentlemen now survives; but, feeling how much I owe to both, I cannot omit this small tribute to their memory.

In the early part of 1845, after having been requested to take in advance the contributions of three of the larger towns, I received from Sir George Larpent a formal copy of the resolutions of the Mercantile Committee, together with a cheque for £10,000, the final presentation being deferred until the accounts should be entirely made up.

Of course the main proceeding made its way into the newspapers, and thus became known to the public in general, and to the Commissioners of the Income Tax in particular--the consequence being an application from the Commissioners for Brighton, demanding income-tax upon the chief amount. Finding that representations to them produced no effect, I overleaped the next stage, and went at once to Mr. Trevelyan at the Treasury, who, like the Duke of Wellington on a well known occasion, exclaimed, "This is too bad!" adding, "It will never do first to deprive you of your salary, and then to tax the public subscription made in lieu of it. Leave this to me." I willingly agreed, and a few days later received a letter from the Income Tax Commissioners, enclosing an instruction from the chief office for the withdrawal of the demand.

It would be ungrateful to omit mention here of some indications of public satisfaction besides those of a pecuniary nature. Thus, I received the following interesting letter from Mr. Cobden:--

"MY DEAR SIR, "Manchester, 30th May, 1846.

* * * * *

"The League will be virtually dissolved by the passing of Peel's measure. I shall feel like an emancipated negro--having fulfilled my seven years' apprenticeship to an agitation which has known no respite. I feel that _you_ have done not a little to strike the fetters from my limbs, for without the penny postage we might have had more years of agitation and anxiety.

"Believe me, faithfully yours, "RICHARD COBDEN.

"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.

I then referred to the good effects of penny postage on the action of other countries; its adoption by the British Parliament having already led to reductions in Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain, and the United States of America.

I continued as follows:--

"Before I conclude, I must request your kind indulgence while I lay before you a brief statement of the manner in which the establishment of penny postage has affected myself. It is notorious that a reformer must not expect a life of ease and comfort. Judging from my own experience, he must make up his mind to labour hard, to encounter much disappointment, and to have his motives and conduct misunderstood and misrepresented. Still, when I compare my own with the course of earlier reformers, I cannot but feel that, independent even of the munificent reward which your kindness has bestowed upon me, I have in many respects been most fortunate. Sir Samuel Romilly tried year after year in vain to effect so obvious an improvement as the abolition of capital punishment for privately stealing in a shop to the extent of five shillings. This attempt met with but little support from the people, while it was opposed by the Government of the day, by Lord Chancellor Eldon, and by Chief Justice Ellenborough. I, on the contrary, have seen my plan, however imperfectly, brought into practice; and none but those who have laboured long and anxiously to effect an important improvement can form any conception of the gratification which such a result brings with it. There was, however, one period of my course to which I cannot even now revert without pain. I allude to that period when, with my health impaired by six years of incessant labour and anxiety, I was dismissed from the Treasury, and left to seek afresh the means of supporting my family. I have on a former occasion expressed my thanks to Sir Robert Peel for the kind manner in which he has more than once been pleased to speak of my labours. I now thank him for the honour he has done me in contributing to the Testimonial; but had he yielded to my entreaties to be allowed, at any pecuniary sacrifice to myself, to work out my own plan--to prove that I had not misled the public as to its results, nor even adopted those sanguine views which in a projector might perhaps be forgiven, however erroneous;--had he done this, my gratitude would have been unbounded. But severe as was the disappointment which I felt, and still feel, at being unjustly deprived of all participation in the execution and completion of my own plan--in seeing it left in the hands of gentlemen who feel no interest in its success, and who, I must say, have evinced no peculiar aptitude either for comprehending its principles, or for devising and executing the necessary details--even at that moment of severe disappointment, I can truly say that I felt no regret at having embarked in the great work of Post Office improvement."

I concluded thus:--

"I trust that you, as well as the thousands of my friends and benefactors who are not now present, will not judge of the strength of my feelings by the feebleness of their expression, but that you and all will believe that I, and every member of my family, feel truly grateful for the princely gift, and for the high honour which have been conferred upon us."