Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/713

1885.] == CHEAP TELEGRAMS. ==

the majority of people are complaining that the Government proposal in the matter of cheap telegrams are insufficient and disappointing, it may perhaps be allowed to us to point out a side of the question which has hardly received proper attention.

Sixpenny telegrams have been so long talked about that people had come to imagine that the present shilling rate was going to be reduced to sixpence, for an equivalent or nearly equivalent length of message. The all-important factor in the question – viz., at what cost, that is, at what expense, the Post-office could send a short telegram – has been completely ignored in most quarters. It was conveniently assumed when the idea of sixpenny telegrams was first started, that the cost of sending a message of ten words would be half the cost of sending a message of twenty words; and on this hasty assumption it was laid down that a net revenue as great as that now derived from shilling telegrams might in a few years be obtained from sixpenny telegrams; any loss felt at first from the fall in price being more than recouped by the immense increase of business.

Unfortunately the expense of sending telegrams cannot be reduced in this short and pleasant way. For one thing, there are processes to be gone through, common to all telegrams, short or long, and equally expensive whether the telegram consist of three or thirty words. For another, although the difference in length between, say, a message of twenty and a message of thirty words represents some difference in expense, that difference is not so great as the difference in price to the sender of the telegram – viz., at the present rate 6d., or at the future rate 5d. In fact, it is the last part of the message which pays, and not the early part. Mr Shaw Lefevre, in introducing his Bill for "sixpenny telegrams," stated that the present average cost to the country of sending every telegram is 10d.; but that it is anticipated this cost would be reduced to 8¾d. when shorter telegrams come into vogue. Thus every "sixpenny telegram" will be sent at a loss; and unless the average price paid by the telegraphing public exceeds 8¾d., the telegraph revenue will show not only the very large reduction already predicted by Mr Shaw Lefevre, but an actual deficit. Now no amount of increase in the number of telegrams sent will get over this. If the average telegram is sent at a loss – that is, for a price lower than the cost of sending it – the total result must be a deficit, – a fact which, however patent, has been persistently blinked by the advocates in the press of a reduced telegraph tariff.

So far as to the cost. With regard to the receipts, Mr Shaw Lefevre estimated that in the first year the average length of message, under the new tariff, would be twenty words, yielding 10d.; but it must be evident to every one who considers the matter, that this estimate, even if not over-sanguine as an estimate for the first year, does not repre-