Page:The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago.djvu/60

 Very different is the case of the new postage. By the same means which are yearly augmenting the revenue, there is a strengthening of social and domestic charities. The same arrangements which carry more money into the Treasury, which stimulate commerce and encourage science and literature, serve to expand the influences of home, and to repeal for the dispersed the sentence of banishment from the best influences of life. From this strong and honourable peculiarity our new Post Office system will, I imagine, take rank in history above all fiscal arrangements of any former time.

It will stand alone as being not only tolerated and obeyed, but as having won for Government a gratitude and attachment such as no other single measure could win, and such as will deepen with every passing year. My own belief is that at this moment such grateful attachment is already a set-off against a large measure of disaffection, partial and imperfect as is, as yet, the working of the system.

As regards the author of the penny postage system, I know, of my own knowledge, that a multitude of persons are, like myself, really oppressed by the sense of obligation as yet almost unacknowledged and wholly unrequited. The personal obligations of every one of us are heavy, but when we think of the amount of blessing he has conferred on the morals and affections of a whole people, of the number of innocent persons and sufferers cheered by the knowledge spread abroad and human happiness promoted by his single hand, we are led to question whether any one member of society ever before discharged so much of the functions at once of the pulpit, the press, the parent, the physician, and the ruler—ever in so short a time benefited his nation so vastly, or secured so unlimited a boon to the subjects of an empire; and when other nations shall have adopted his reforms, there may be an extension even of this praise.

We now place a facsimile of Sir Rowland Hill's pamphlet in our readers' hands.