Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/588

Rh 566 P O S T-O F F 1 C E [HISTORY. Perman- The system of burdening the post-office revenue with pensions, ent pen- nearly all of which hail not the slightest connexion with the postal sions. service, and some of which were unconnected with any sort of service that can possibly be called public, 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 list of pensions so chargeable stood thus : Earl of Rochester 4,000 Duchess of Cleveland 4,700 Duke of Leeds 3,. r &amp;gt;00 Duke of Schomberg 4,000 Earl of Bath 2,500 Lord Keeper 2,000 William Dockwra (until 1697) 500 Total 21,200 Queen Anne granted a pension of 5000 to the duke of Marl- borough, charged in like manner. In March 1857 the existing pensions ceased to be payable by the post-office, and became charge able to the consolidated fund. The first important and enduring impulse to the develop ment of the latent powers of the post-office, both as a public agency and as a source of revenue, was given by the shrewdness and energy of the manager of the Bath Palmer s theatre, John Palmer. Palmer s notice was attracted to lnail - the subject in October 1782. His avocations had made him familiar with that great western road which was still in such peculiar favour, alike with people of fashion and with the gentlemen of the highway. So habitual were the robberies of the post that they came to be regarded by its officials as among the necessary conditions of human affairs. They urged on the public the precaution of send ing all bank-notes and bills of exchange in halves, and pointed the warning with a philosophical remark, that &quot;there are no other means of preventing robberies with effect, as it has been proved that the strongest carts that could be made, lined and bound with iron, were soon broken open by a robber.&quot; At this period, in addition to the recognized perils of the roads, the postal system was characterized by extreme irregularity in the departure of mails and delivery of letters, by an average speed of about 3|- miles in the hour, and by a rapidly-increasing diversion of correspond ence into illicit channels. The nett revenue, which had averaged 167,176 during the ten years ending with 1773, averaged but 159,625 during the ten years ending with 1 783. Yet, when Palmer suggested that by building mail- coaches of a construction 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 consider ably increased, the officials pertinaciously opposed the plan and maintained that the existing system was all but perfect. Lord Camden, however, brought the plan under the personal notice of Pitt. No sooner was the minister convinced of its merits than he insisted on its being tried. The experi ment was made in August 1784, and its success exceeded all anticipation. The following table will show the rapid progress of the postal revenue under the new arrangements. TABLE II. Gross and Nett Income, 1784-1805. Year. Gross Income. Nett Revenue. 1784 s. d. 420,101 1 8 s. d. 196 513 16 7 1785 463,753 8 4 261,409 18 2 1790 533,198 1 9 331,179 18 8 1795 745,238 414,548 11 7 1800 1,083,950 720,981 17 1 1805 . . 1 317,842 944,382 8 4 It had been at first proposed to reward Palmer by a grant for life of two and a half per cent, on a certain proportion of the increased nett revenue, which would eventually have given him some 10,000 a year; but this proposition fell through, in consequence either of technical difficulties created by the Post-Office Act or of the opposition of the post -office authorities. Pitt, how ever, 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, 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. 1 Scotland shared in the advantages of the mail-coach system from Scottis the first. Shortly before its introduction the local penny post was and Iri set on foot in Edinburgh by Peter &quot;Williamson, the keeper of a post- coffee-room in the hall of Parliament House. He employed four office, letter-carriers, in uniform, appointed receivers in various parts of 1708- the city, and established hourly deliveries. 2 The officials of the 1801. 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. A dead-letter office was established in 1784. The entire staff of the Edinburgh post-office, which consisted in 1708 of seven persons, now comprised twenty-five, the cost of the office being 1406. In 1796 the number of functionaries had increased to forty, and the cost to 3278. 3 But in Ireland the old state of things con tinued until the present century. In 1801 only three public carriages in the whole country conveyed mails. There were, indeed, few roads of any sort, and none on which coaches could travel faster than four miles an hour. 4 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 per cent. ; whilst in Scotland the receipts were 100,651, and the charges 16,896, or somewhat less than 17 per cent. 5 In the American colonies postal improvements may be dated from Frank the administration of Franklin, who was virtually the last colonial lin. postmaster -general, as well as unquestionably the best. In one shape or another he had forty years experience of postal work, hav ing been appointed postmaster at Philadelphia as early as October 1737. When he became postmaster -general in 1753 he bestirred himself for the improvement of his department in that practical painstaking way with which he was wont to guide any plough he had once put his hand to, whatever the ground it had to work in. 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, &quot; 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 be tween 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 dis placed 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.&quot; The interval between the development of Palmer s improved methods (as far as that development was permitted by the authori ties), which we take to be pretty nearly contemporaneous with the parliamentary settlement of his claims, and the still more import ant 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 investiga tions of the revenue commissioners of 1826 and the following years. Undoubtedly the inquiries of these commissioners attracted a larger share of public attention to the management of the post-office than had theretofore been bestowed on it ; but, if anything had been wanted to throw into bolder relief Hill s intelligent and persevering exertions, these reports supply the want in ample measure. In some important particulars they mark out practical and most valu able reforms, but they are so clumsy in arrangement, so resilient in the treatment of the various branches of the service, and so crowded with petty details as to contrast most unfavourably with the lucid order and vigorous reasoning of Rowland Hill s Post- 1 Debates of both Houses of Parliament in 1808 relative to the Agree ment for the Reform and Improvement of the Post-Office, passim. 2 Lang, Historical Summary of the Post-Office in Scotland, 15. 3 Appendix to Seventh Report from Select Committee on Finance (1797), reprinted in collective series of reports, xii. 209. 4 Minutes of Evidence before Select Committee on Taxation of In ternal Communication (1837), evidence of Sir Edward Lees, 397. 5 Report, &amp;lt;L-c., of Select Committee on Postage.