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

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were no rural or village posts. Letters were conveyed by post to towns of any considerable size, and were fetched from these places by arrangement on behalf of the people living in the surrounding villages. Probably a village generally employed its own messenger, paying him in some cases a fixed sum as wages, and in others a penny or more on every letter carried. Sometimes a pauper was employed for this work. Wealthy people made their own arrangements. In 1801 the Post Office made efforts to reach the villages, but right down to 1840 the service was fitful and irregular, and was not uniform. The Government of Sir Robert Peel in 1843 decided that the principle on which rural posts should be established should be based simply upon the number of letters for each locality. “All places, the letters for which exceed 100 a week, should be deemed entitled to the privilege of a receiving office and a free daily delivery of their letters.” In 1850 this rule was still further simplified, and the rule was now that a post should be established when it would pay its way. Modifications of even this rule took place in successive years, and the network of rural posts extended so much that in 1862 the proportion of letters delivered to the addressees was estimated to reach 94 per cent. In 1871 the Postmaster-General was able to announce that he hoped “the time is not distant when a free delivery at least two or three times a week will be provided for every house in the country, however remote.” But it was twenty years before this pious hope began to be fulfilled. At the end of 1892 it was estimated that there were still about 32,000,000 letters a year not delivered by the Post Office. Nearly 8,000,000 letters were in the next year brought into free delivery, and the work of extension went on gradually until the day of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when it was announced that a regular delivery of letters would be given to every house in the Kingdom. We can now scarcely understand any other state of things to be endurable for a day.