Page:The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago.djvu/135

Rh it will be acceptable, from the increased facilities it will afford for their correspondence. To the middle classes it will bring relief from oppressive and irritating demands which they pay grudgingly; estimating them even beyond their real amount, because probably of their frequent recurrence–which they avoid by every possible contrivance, and which they would consider quite intolerable if they knew that nearly the whole is a tax. And to the poor it will afford the means of communication with their distant friends and relatives, from which they are at present debarred. It will give increased energy to trade; it will remove innumerable temptations to fraud; and it will be an important step in general education: the more important, perhaps, because it calls on Government for no factitious aid, for nothing in the shape of encouragement, still less of compulsion; but merely for the removal of an obstacle, created by the law, to that spontaneous education which happily is extending through the country, and which, even the opponents of a national system will agree, ought to be unobstructed in its progress.

We see, then, that the state of the revenue, the improved means of conveyance, the necessities of commerce, the proposed alterations in the controlling authority, the state of public opinion,–all things concur in rendering the present the most desirable time for a complete reform of the Post Office. A more popular measure could not be discovered. It would bring immediate, substantial, practical,