Her Majesty's Mails

FOOTNOTES: [81] Select Committee of Postage, 1843, p. 133. [82] Miss Martineau, quoting from the Political Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 563, says that Mr. Hill first offered his scheme to the Government of Lord Melbourne before it was presented to the country. However this may be, Mr. Hill makes no mention of the fact in his frequent appearances before Committees of the House of Commons, &c. [83] Post-Office Reform, p. 2, third edition. [84] Post-Office Reform, p. 14, third edition. [85] Our Exemplars, Poor and Rich, edited by Matthew Davenport Hill. London, 1851, p. 317. [86] The Westminster Review, July, 1860, p. 78, in an able but exceedingly ex parte article on "The Post-Office Monopoly," doubts whether Mr. Hill's system is a near approximation to perfect justice, being, in its opinion, "by no means the summum bonum of letter-rates." "A charge of one penny for the carriage of all letters of a certain weight within the United Kingdom, irrespective of distance, is eminently arbitrary."... "No one in London who has written two letters, one to a friend residing in the same town as himself, and another to one in Edinburgh, can have failed, in affixing the stamps to them, to observe the unfairness of charging the same sum for carrying the one 400 yards and the other 400 miles, when the cost of transmission must in the one case be so much more than in the other." These quotations plainly show that Mr. Hill's early arguments have been lost upon the reviewer. If Mr. Hill demonstrated one thing more plainly than another, it was that the absolute cost of the transmission of each letter was so infinitesimally small, that if charged according to that cost, the postage could not be collected. Besides, it is not certain that the one letter would cost the Post-Office more than the other. Moreover, to the sender the value of the conveyance of the local letter was equal to its cost, or he would have forwarded it by other means. No doubt a strong argument might be based on these grounds, as to the justice of a lower rate for letters posted and delivered in the same town. Such a measure might be supported on Mr. Hill's principles; but the apparent anomaly is surely no argument against a State monopoly of letter-carrying.