Mr. Knight had made the proposal referred to in a private letter to Lord Althorp, Chancellor of the Exchequer.[4]
The ultimate result of the campaign was the reduction, not the abolition, of the Newspaper Tax, and, as the reduced tax of one penny for an ordinary newspaper included free transmission in the post, there was no need for the adoption of Mr. Knight's proposal at that time. It is to be noted, however, that Mr. Knight was an active supporter of Rowland Hill's plan a few years later, and that Hill was not unaware of the suggestion, for he wrote of it in his pamphlet that: "Availing myself of this excellent suggestion, I propose the following arrangement:--Let stamped covers and sheets of paper be supplied to the public from the Stamp Office or Post Office, as may be most convenient, and sold at such a price as to include the postage: letters so stamped might be put into the letter-box, as at present."
Dr. Gray, the eminent zoologist of the British Museum and one of the earliest scientific collectors of postage-stamps, made a somewhat ambiguous claim to the authorship of the proposal for the prepayment of postage by means of stamps. When challenged by Rowland Hill in _The Athenæum_,[5] he stated in that journal that "I have simply said I believe I was the first who proposed the system of a small uniform rate of postage to be prepaid by stamps." When Mr. Knight entered upon the _Athenæum_ correspondence, Dr. Gray reminded him of an incident:
"In the spring of 1834 we [Knight and Gray] were fellow-passengers in the basket of a Blackheath coach, when the subject was discussed. I then stated, as I had frequently done before to other fellow-travellers, my views in relation to the prepayment of postage by stamps. These views Mr. Knight combated, and so little was he then prepared to adopt them that he exclaimed, as he quitted the coach at the corner of Fleet Street, 'Gray, you are more fit for Bedlam than for the British Museum.'" Knight, whose case has the advantage of attaining substantial record in _Hansard_ and _The Mirror of Parliament_, disclaimed any connection with the incident, and left his friends to decide "whether the language, stated to have been used by me to a gentleman of scientific eminence, would not have been better suited to a costermonger returning from Greenwich fair than to mine."