Mr. Lewins states that the revenue derived in 1815 from the post-office amounted to a million and a half; while twenty-one years afterwards,—in 1836,—notwithstanding the increase of trade and the diffusion of knowledge, the increase of this sum had only been between three and four thousand pounds. The evil of high rates led not merely to small returns, but to the evasion of postage by illicit means of conveyance, so that some carriers of letters were doing as large a business as the post-office itself.
This will appear evident from the statement that a post-office official seized a parcel containing eleven hundred letters in a single bag in the warehouse of a London carrier. The head of this firm proffered instant payment of £500 if the penalties were not sued for. The postmaster-general accepted the offer, and the letters passed through the post-office on the same night.
So early as 1833, the late Mr. Wallace, M. P. for Greenock, drew the attention of the House of Commons to the numerous abuses in the post-office. There can be no question that his frequent motions and speeches directed public attention specifically to the subject and incalculably advanced the cause of reform. Mr. Wallace was not aided by the government or by the aristocracy or higher professional classes; but he derived much active support from the mercantile and manufacturing community, and from the shopkeepers in all the great towns of the empire.
It was the ventilation of the subject of the post-office by the member for Greenock that first drew the attention of Mr.—now Sir—Rowland Hill, to the subject. The son of a country schoolmaster, Mr. Hill had for a long time acted as usher at his father’s establishment at Birmingham. Being of an active and energetic disposition, he left the paternal roof for the metropolis, and was in 1833, when he was about thirty-eight years of age, secretary to the commissioners for the colonization of South Australia. Here he exhibited powers of organization, and we have from his own pen a statement that he read very carefully all the reports on post-office subjects. He put himself into communication with Mr. Wallace, M. P., who afforded him much assistance. He also corresponded with Lord Lichfield, then postmaster-general, who imparted to him the official information he sought. In January, 1837, Mr. Hill published the results of his investigations and embodied his schemes in a pamphlet entitled “Post-Office Reform: its Importance and Practicability.” The pamphlet created a sensation in the mercantile world. It was well noticed in the “Spectator” and “Morning Chronicle,” to both of which journals Mr. Hill’s elder brother Matthew, now a commissioner of bankruptcy at Bristol, contributed. Mr. Rowland Hill contended that the post-office was not making progress like other great national interests,—that its revenue had diminished instead of increased, though the population had augmented six millions and trade and commerce had proportionally increased. From data in his possession Mr. Hill pretty accurately proved that the primary distribution, as he called the cost of receiving and delivering the letters, and also the cost of transit, took two-thirds of the total cost of the management of the post-office. Out of the total postal expenditure of £700,000, Mr. Hill calculated that the amount which had to do with the distance letters travelled amounted to £144,000. From calculations which he then made, he arrived at the conclusion that the average cost of conveying each letter was less than the one-tenth of a penny. By this process he deduced the conclusion that postage ought to be uniform. The propriety of a uniform rate was further demonstrated by the fact that under the old system the cost of transmission was not always dependent on distance. The case was made still plainer by these facts. An Edinburgh letter, costing the post-office an infinitesimal fraction of a farthing, was charged 1_s._ 1-1/2_d._, while a letter for Louth, in Lincolnshire, costing the post-office fifty times as much, was charged 10_d._