Post and Postal Services

The development of the posts since the reforms of Witherings had now raised a difficult administrative problem, viz., that of the "cross-posts," or letters exchanged between one town and another without passing through London. As all accounting arrangements were centralised in the capital, there was here room for a serious leakage of revenue, and adequate control of the cross-posts was becoming essential. At this juncture another reformer appeared in the person of Ralph Allen, postmaster of Bath. Allen, who had been in the postal service since his boyhood, had acquired an ex traordinarily detailed knowledge of the working of the mail ser vices in all parts of the country, and was convinced that with proper management the cross-posts could be turned into a source of revenue. In 1719 he offered to farm them for 16,000 a year, or 50% more than the net receipts at that time, and in 1721 this offer was accepted for a term of seven years. Allen's farm was after a short time a great success and the contract was renewed, at a constantly increasing rent, until his death in 1769. The secret of his success was his intimate knowledge of the roads and the post towns, the introduction of a simple system of accounting, and con stant scrutiny of postmasters' accounts and inspection of their proceedings. In the 48 years for which he successfully managed this department of the post office, Allen not only built up a system far in advance of that to which he succeeded, but showed clearly the financial possibilities of improved communication, since he not only increased fivefold the revenue of the post office from the cross-posts, but accumulated a considerable fortune, which is said to have amounted to 1500,00o, for himself. The net revenue of the post office increased from 196,000 in 1724 to 1165,000 in 1769.

The later years of the r8th century were marked by a great de velopment of the main roads and a consequent improvement in speed of communication. Regular stage-coach services began to be established; but for some time the post office persisted in des patching its mails by the postboys of the earlier period. The result was that the coaches, travelling at double the speed of the post boys, were largely used for the illegal transmission of private let ters, and the post office revenue suffered correspondingly. The establishment of the mail coach service was due to John Palmer, a theatre proprietor of Bath, who devised a scheme for organizing coaches running on regular schedules on the main roads and thus giving to letters the same speedy transmission which was available for passengers and parcels. The coaches were all to leave London at the same time-8 P.M.-and to return together as far as pos sible. The security of the mails was to be provided for by armed guards.

First Mail Coach, 1784.

Palmer succeeded in bringing this project under the personal notice of Pitt, who saw its merits and ordered its adoption. The first mail coach was established between London and Bath in i 784 ; and within two years coaches were run ning to Norwich, Nottingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Mil ford, Holyhead, Exeter and many other places. By 1797 there were 42 mail coach routes in operation; and Palmer's prediction that they would cost no more than the postboys was borne out by the fact that after some years their cost was only one half that of the system they superseded. The time taken from London to Holy

head was 27 hours, to Edinburgh 43 hours, to Falmouth 29 hours and so on. The development of the post was, however, severely hampered by the necessity of obtaining revenue to finance the war with France, and the rates of postage were periodically in creased until in they attained the highest point they had ever reached, and at which they remained until the reforms of Rowland Hill. The charge for a single letter for a distance of 15 miles was 4d. ; the graduation of the scale of distances was very steep and reached a maximum of i7d. for a distance of 700 miles. Whatever may be thought of the policy of extracting revenue from a tax on communications, it cannot be denied that it was extremely effi cient up to a point, as by 1815 the post office was yielding a net revenue of 11,50o,000 a year or nearly three times its total expenditure.

It is surprising that rates so high could have been retained for 25 years after Waterloo, and when Rowland Hill published his pamphlet on postage in 1836 he had behind him a substantial vol ume of public discontent. His main argument for reform was that in spite of the growth of trade and population the postal revenue had remained stationary for a long period, while revenue from other sources had been steadily increasing. Hill argued from this that the postal administration was conducted on principles which were in effect an obstacle to the development of postal business. The principal features of the scheme put forward were the aboli tion of the method of charging postage on the basis of distance— Hill arguing with great cogency, on the basis of such statistics as were available, that the actual cost of carriage varied within such extremely small limits that differences due to distance could be ignored ; the abolition of the old method of charging one sheet of paper as a single letter, two sheets as a double letter, and so on, and the substitution of rates based simply on weight ; the prepayment of letters by postage stamps; and the adoption of a uniform minimum rate of id.

Rowland Hill's Success, 1840.

So drastic a change of policy was not to be carried without a struggle ; and it was only after four years of agitation and parliamentary enquiry that penny post age was finally established in 1840. This was the most signal serv ice Great Britain has rendered to the cause of postal progress, and from the point of view of developing social relations and business communications it was an unqualified success, and estab lished a standard to which it became the ambition of the rest of the world to attain.

This success, however, had to be paid for in another direction. Cheap postage rates are not in themselves the gold mine that cer tain of their enthusiastic supporters appear to imagine; and it is significant to note that the post office revenue, which in 1839 was over £1,600,0oo, dropped to Lsoo,o00 in the following year. It was not until 35 years after the introduction of Rowland Hill's reform, and until there had been an increase of a thousand per cent in the number of letters delivered, that the revenue again reached the level at which it had stood in 1839.