Her Majesty's Mails

CHAPTER III. ON THE MAIL-PACKET SERVICE. Our home and foreign mail-packet service is a costly and gigantic branch of the Post-Office establishment. During the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the service was under the control of the Post-Office authorities. We have already given many details of the packet management of the period. It was then transferred to the Board of Admiralty, in whose hands it continued up to so late as 1860. Even at the commencement of the present century, the service seems to have been carried on regardless of economy, and not without traces of that wastefulness--we might almost say corruption--in the management, which, a hundred years previously, would not have been regarded as very remarkable. The arrangements eighty years ago, were none of the best. At this period some of the vessels employed to convey mails were hired, without any tender, while some few were the property of the Crown. In 1788, the state of the marine mail service attracted parliamentary attention; for in that year we find a Committee of Fees and Gratuities reporting that the cost of the mail service had reached an unreasonable sum. They stated that for eighteen years that cost had been over a million sterling, or an average charge of 60,000l. annually. With regard to the manner in which the work was done, they found that many officers of the Post-Office, "even down to the chamber keepers," were owners of some of the packets employed to the exclusion of all else. This Committee, with a view to remedying these and other abuses, recommended that the Government should change the system entirely--the Government share of the packets to be sold, and the entire service offered by public and competitive tender. That this advice was not acted upon, is clear from the fact that four years afterwards, the Finance Committee urged upon the Government the necessity of complying with the recommendations of 1788. In 1810, the cost of the service had increased to 105,000l.; in 1814 to 160,000l.[166]