How would the Englishman of to-day endure the former exactions of the
Post Office? The family letters of sixty years ago, written on the
largest sheets purchasable, crossed and crammed to the point of
illegibility, filled with the news of many and many a week, still
witness of the time when "a letter from London to Brighton cost
eightpence, to Aberdeen one and threepence-halfpenny, to Belfast one
and fourpence"; when, "if the letter were written on more than one
sheet, it came under the operation of a higher scale of charges," and
when the privilege of franking letters, enjoyed and very largely
exercised by members of Parliament and members of the Government, had
the peculiar effect of throwing the cost of the mail service exactly
on that part of the community which was least able to bear it. The
result of the injustice was as demoralising as might have been
expected. The poorer people who desired to have tidings of distant
friend or relative were driven by the prohibitory rates of postage
into all sorts of curious, not quite honest devices, to gratify their
natural desire without being too heavily taxed for it. A brother and
sister, for instance, unable to afford themselves the costly luxury
of regular correspondence, would obtain assurance of each other's
well-being by transmission through the post at stated intervals of
blank papers duly sealed and addressed: the arrival of the postman
with a missive of this kind announced to the recipient that all was
well with the sender, so the unpaid "letter" was cheerfully left on
the messenger's hands. Such an incident, coming under the notice of
Mr. Rowland Hill, impressed him with a sense of hardship and wrong in
the system that bore these fruits; and he set himself with strenuous
patience to remedy the wrong and the hardship. His scheme of reform
was worked out and laid before the public early in 1837; in the third
year of Her Majesty's reign it was first adopted in its entirety,