[118] How much mistaken the old warrior was as regards the soldiers' letters has been abundantly proved. During the first eight months of postal communication between the United Kingdom and our comparatively small army in the Crimea—and long, therefore, before the Board School era—more than 350,000 letters passed each way; while when the Money Order system, for the first time in history, was extended to the seat of war, in one year over £100,000 was sent home for wives and families.
[120] When it passed the Lords, Cobden is said to have exclaimed: “There go the Corn Laws!”
[121] Colonel Perronet Thompson was the author of the once famous “Anti-Corn-Law Catechism,” which might, with great advantage, be reprinted now. He was a public-spirited man, one of the foremost among the free-traders, and deserves to be better remembered than he is.
[122] The pamphlet was published at a shilling; in those days of paper taxation, when books were necessarily dear and correspondingly scarce, a by no means exorbitant price.
[123] During a part of Cobden's Parliamentary career and that of his and our friends, J. B. Smith and Sir Joshua Walmsley, all three men were next-door neighbours, living in London in three adjoining houses. Hence Nos. 101, 103, and 105 Westbourne Terrace came to be known as “Radical Row.”
[124] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago,” p. 24.
[125] Losses, for example, are often imputed to the Post Office for which it is entirely blameless. Did space allow, scores of instances might be cited. One of the most absurd was the case of a London merchant, who, in the course of very many months, wrote at intervals angry letters to the Postmaster-General asking why such or such a letter had not reached its destination. No amount of enquiries could trace the errant missives; and the luckless Department was, at corresponding intervals, denounced for its stupidity in equally angry letters to the Press. One day, while certain city improvements were being carried out, an ancient pump, near the merchant's office, which had long refused to yield any water was taken down, when its interior presented an unusual appearance. An errand-boy had, at odd times, been sent to post the Firm's letters, and had slipped them into the narrow slit where once the vanished pump-handle used to work. The introduction of street letter-boxes was then recent, and their aspect still unfamiliar. The boy had therefore taken the venerable relic for one of those novel structures, and all the missing letters lay therein.