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The postal revenue of Great Britain, meanwhile, stood thus:— Gross and Net Income, 1724–1774.

The system of burdening the post-office revenue with pensions, nearly all of which had no public connexion with the postal service, and some of which were unconnected with any public service, was begun by Charles II., who granted to Barbara, duchess of Cleveland, £4700 a year, and to the earl of Rochester £4000 a year, out of that revenue. The example was followed until, in 1694, the pensions so chargeable amounted to £21,200. Queen Anne granted a pension of £5000 to the duke of Marlborough, charged in like manner. In March 1857 the existing pensions ceased to be payable by the post office, and became chargeable to the consolidated fund.

In October 1782 the notice of the manager of the Bath theatre, John Palmer (1742–1818), was attracted to the postal service. So habitual were the robberies of the post that they came to be regarded as necessary evils. The officials urged the precaution of sending all bank-notes and bills of exchange in halves, and pointed the warning with a philosophical remark that “there are no other means of preventing robberies with effect.” At this period the postal system was characterized by extreme irregularity in the departure of mails and delivery of letters by an average speed of about 3 m. in the hour, and by a rapidly increasing diversion of correspondence into illicit channels. The net revenue, which had averaged £167,176 during the ten years ending with 1773, averaged but £159,625 during the ten years ending with 1783. Yet, when Palmer suggested that by building mail-coaches expressly adapted to run at a good speed, by furnishing a liberal supply of horses, and by attaching an armed guard to each coach the public would be greatly benefited, and the post-office revenue considerably increased, the officials maintained that the existing system was all but perfect. Lord Camden, however, brought the plan under the personal notice of Pitt, who insisted on its being tried. The experiment was made in August 1784, and its success exceeded all anticipation. The following table shows the rapid increase of revenue under the new arrangements:— Gross and Net Income, 1784–1805.

It had been at first proposed to reward Palmer by a grant for life of 2% on a certain proportion of the increased net revenue, which would eventually have given him some £10,000 a year, but this proposition fell through. Pitt, however, appointed Palmer to be comptroller-general of postal revenues, an office which was soon made too hot for him to hold. He obtained a pension of £3000 a year, and ultimately, by the act 53 Geo. III. c. 157 (1813), after his case had received the sanction of five successive majorities against government, an additional sum of £50,000. Every sort of obstruction was placed in the way of his reward, although nearly a million had been added to the annual public revenue, and during a quarter of a century the mails had been conveyed over an aggregate of some seventy millions of miles without the occurrence of one serious mail robbery.

Scotland shared in the advantages of the mail-coach system from the first. Shortly before its introduction the local penny post was set on foot in Edinburgh by Peter Williamson, the keeper of a coffee-room in the hall of Parliament House. He employed four letter-carriers, in uniform, appointed receivers in various parts of the city, and established hourly deliveries. The officials of the post, when the success of the plan had become fully apparent, gave Williamson a pension, and absorbed his business, the acquisition of which was subsequently confirmed by the Act 34 Geo. III. c. 17 (1794). A dead-letter office was established in 1784. But in Ireland in 1801 only three public carriages conveyed mails. There were, indeed, few roads of any sort, and none on which coaches could travel faster than four miles an hour. At this period the gross.receipts of the Irish post office were £80,040; the charges of management and collection were £59,216, or at the rate of more than 70%; whilst in Scotland the receipts were £100,651, and the charges £16,896, or somewhat less than 17%.

In the American colonies postal improvements may be dated from the administration of Franklin, who was virtually the last colonial postmaster-general, as well as the best. In one shape or another he had forty years' experience of postal work, having been appointed postmaster at Philadelphia in October 1737. When he became postmaster-general in 1753 he visited all the chief post offices throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England, looking at everything with his own eyes. His administration cannot be better summed up than we find it to be in a sentence or two which he wrote soon after his dismissal. Up to the date of his appointment, he says, “the American post office had never paid anything to that of Britain. We [i.e. himself and his assistant] were to have £600 a year between us, if we could make that sum out of the profits of the office. . . . In the first four years the office became above £900 in debt to us. But it soon after began to repay us; and before I was displaced by a freak of the minister’s, we had brought it to yield three times as much clear revenue to the Crown as the post office of Ireland. Since that imprudent transaction they have received from it—not one farthing.”

The interval between the development of Palmer’s methods, and the reforms introduced twenty-seven years later by Sir Rowland Hill, is chiefly marked by the growth of the packet system, under the influence of steam navigation, and by the elaborate investigations of the revenue commissioners of 1820 and the following years. In some important particulars these mark out practical and most valuable reforms, but they contrasted unfavourably with the lucidity and reasoning of Rowland Hill’s Post Office Reform.

As early as 1788 the cost of the packets employed by the post office attracted parliamentary attention. In that year the “commissioners of fees and gratuities” reported that in the preceding seventeen years the total cost of this branch had amounted to £1,038,133; and they naturally laid stress on the circumstance that many officers of the post office were owners of such packets, even down to the chamber-keeper. At this time part of the packet service was performed by hired vessels, and part by vessels which were the property of the Crown. The commissioners recommended that the latter should be sold, and the entire service be provided for by public and competitive tender. The subject was again inquired, into by the finance committee of 1798, which reported that the recommendation of 1788 had not been fully acted upon, and expressed its concurrence in that recommendation. The plan was then to a considerable extent enforced. But the war rapidly increased the expenditure. The average (£61,000) of 1771–1787 had increased in 1797 to £78,439, in 1810 to £105,000, in 1814 to £160,603 In the succeeding years of peace the expense fell to an average of about £85,000. As early as 1818 the “Rob Roy” plied regularly between Greenock and Belfast; but no use was made of steam navigation for the postal service until 1821, when the postmaster-general established Crown packets. The expenditure under the new system, from that date to 1829 inclusive, was thus reported by the commissioners of revenue inquiry in 1830:— Cost of Packet Service, 1820–1829. The general administration of postal affairs at this period was still characterized by repeated advances in the letter rates, and the