The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

CHAPTER II THE PENNY POST It would be unjust to the memory of a great postal reformer to say that George Stephenson was the real author of Penny Postage, but it is quite fair to submit that it was the coming of the mail train which made Sir Rowland Hill's reform the great success which it ultimately became. It is true Sir Rowland Hill worked out his scheme when the mail coaches were still running, and it was a part of his case that the reform could be carried through with existing methods of carrying the mails, but it is open to serious doubt whether he could have succeeded had not the vast possibilities of the railway as an agent of the Post Office been before the minds of the people of this country when the plan was being discussed in Parliament and in the country. That the coming of the mail train was a probability in Sir Rowland Hill's own mind and was an incentive to his efforts while he was working out his scheme, is suggested by a comparison of dates. Sir Rowland Hill's plan was published in 1837. In September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened: in 1833 the London and Birmingham, now the London and North-Western, opened its first section, and by the year 1837 there were in existence the beginnings of the South-Eastern, the London and South-Western, the Great Western, and the Great Eastern Railways, all known at that date under much less ambitious titles. Mr. F. E. Baines, C.B., in his vivid and entertaining book, Forty Years at the Post Office, has described the death of the old and the birth of the new system on the Great North Road. As late as April 1838 the high-road held its traffic, but from the date of the opening from London of the first considerable section of the Birmingham railway the fate of the highway was settled, “for then began this fell opponent to sap the long traffic of the Great North Road.”