George Birkbeck Norman Hill

“ Each had that breadth of view which enables a man to rise above all selfish considerations. Each had been brought up to consider the good of his family rather than his own peculiar good, and to look upon the good of mankind as still higher than the good of his family. Each was deeply convinced of the great truth which Priestley had discovered, and Bentham had advocated—that the object of all government, and of all social institutions, should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number for the greatest length of time. ”

“ Have you made Mr. Baring sufficiently aware of the numerous—I might say numberless—innovations, which your plan of necessity implies? The reduction of postage and the modes of prepayment are, no doubt, the principal features of your plan; but you lay great stress, and very properly, in my opinion, on increasing the facilities for transmitting letters; and this part of the reform will, I apprehend, cause you more labour of detail than that which more strikes the public eye. In this department you will be left to contend with the Post Office almost alone. ”

“ In the instruction that was given there had been but little general improvement. The old classical education was, no doubt, in many ways admirably well suited for boys who were quick at languages. But it made the dull ten times as dull as they came from nature, and marked down many a lad as a hopeless blockhead whose good parts were merely overwhelmed by the gross ignorance of his teachers. Pedantry, scarcely less than penury, can freeze the genial current of the soul. ”

“ From them no small part of the world is likely to remain hidden. To not a little that men have thought and felt they remain insensible. They can form a right judgment of those who differ from them only in opinion, but they find it hard to understand any who go further than this, and differ from them also in sentiment. Lord Macaulay had this defect in a striking degree, and yet he had been brought up in a wider circle than the life of a provincial town, and his mind ranged within no narrow bounds. ”

“ On the right again stands a dutiful boy, reading to his anxious mamma an account of her husband’s hapless shipwreck, who, with hands clasped, is blessing Rowland Hill for the cheap rate at which she gets the disastrous intelligence. At the bottom of all there is the word ‘Postage,’ done in small upon a large pattern of filagree work. With very great propriety the name of the artist is conspicuously placed in one corner, so that the public and posterity may know who is the worthy Oliver of the genius of a Rowland on this triumphant occasion. ”

“ But for this unlucky perversion of the royal features, the penny-post ‘sticking-plaster’ might appropriately have come into fashion and superseded the court sticking-plaster, so common for the concealment of trifling cutaneous cracks on the face of beauty. Thus women and men, too, might have carried sovereigns on their countenances as well as in their hearts and purses, and many a decayed beauty might have refreshed her faded charms with the renovating representation of royal youth and loveliness. ”

“ My mind almost always feels wearied. If I rise earlier than usual in the morning, I am no gainer, for I fall to sleep in the middle of the day; so that the only alternative left me is, either to be satisfied with the little time I can now devote to my own improvement, or give up some of my engagements, and thus lessen our income, which is not at all superfluous. ”

“ It was not till they were grown up that they began at all to mix in the world. When Rowland Hill was twenty, he mentions in his Journal two young men as “almost the only persons excepting our own family with whom I am in habits of intimacy. Indeed, I enjoy so much the society we have at home,” he says, “that I do not feel the want of a very extensive circle of friends.” “They had a little ideal world of their own,” said one who knew them well in those days. Such a world, however noble it may be, has its own dangers. ”

“ From his early boyhood Rowland Hill delighted in long walks. He would go many a mile to see either fine scenery or an old building. Of what had pleased him as a boy, he never grew weary as a man. He had never, he said, to the best of his belief, come within thirty miles of Stonehenge without going to see it. When he was a lad of eleven he paid a visit to Shrewsbury. ”

“ I can easily see how one hundred, or any number of envelopes, might have this small touch of gum applied to them at a dash of a brush. But, indeed, the manufacture of envelopes—supposing Government were to take it in hand—would be so enormous that a small profit on each would realise a great sum. Every one now uses envelopes, which save a world of time; and if you were to furnish the means of closing the letter by an adhesive corner a still further saving of time would take place. ”

“ I believe drawing was the only thing I understood even tolerably. Every attainment I am now master of—and, God knows, they are but few!—I have acquired since I became a teacher, and for the most part by myself. Fortunately I have, in a tolerably high degree, the faculty of invention (and here I ought to consider that this may be in a great measure the effect of education, and if I have acquired this only, much has been done for me) . Many a time have I given lessons, both at home and abroad, on subjects which I began to study with my pupils. ”

“ Hill,—It has frequently occurred to me that if eight or ten individuals of average intellect were to direct their attention simultaneously and in concert on any specific object which it might be desirable to invent, or any particular subject which it might be useful to explain, their joint efforts might produce a more satisfactory result than the unaided powers of a single person, although such person might be considerably superior to any one of the parties to the combination. I am anxious to try this experiment, and it would give me great pleasure if you would join me in it. ”

“ This brought me to the conclusion that, “when a reduction of taxation is about to take place, it is exceedingly important that great care and judgment should be exercised in the selection of the tax to be reduced, in order that the maximum of relief may be afforded to the public with the minimum of injury to the revenue.” ”

“ Dear Sir,—Captain Beaufort [310] told you very truly that I take a strong interest in the progress of the Penny Postage—both a public and a private interest; and I truly think that the British nation, the united empire, owes you millions of thanks for the improvements that have been made in social intercourse—in all the intercourse of human creatures for pleasure or business, affection or profit; including the profits of literature and science—foreign and domestic. ”

“ The more I mix with the world, the more insight I have into the proceedings and opinions of other men, the conviction is forced upon me that our family possesses talents, and energy, and devotedness to one object, seldom to be met with.... Our plans are calculated for large numbers, and to obtain them is the present object of all our attention. Some of us think that the best mode will be to attempt to induce the public to establish a large school or college for the education of the children of the upper and middle classes. ”

“ So far as your object in that direction is concerned, your correspondence will, I suspect, be nugatory. If your object be to justify yourself in the eyes of the public, that, I submit, is supererogatory. You cannot stand better than you do with the impartial British public. You will get no further facilities from Tory functionaries. They hate the whole thing with a diabolical hatred. And well they may. It is a terrible engine for upsetting monopoly and corruption: witness our League operations, the spawn of your penny postage! ”

“ Of course, great benefit to the Post Office is derived from the vast increase in speed, and greater allowance of space; but while in all these the public has its full share, it enjoys at the same time that great reduction in expense, which contrasts so remarkably with the increased charge to the Post Office. To a limited extent, explanation is to be found in the loss of that immunity from tolls which in England all mail-coaches enjoyed on the old roads; but the main augmentation is attributable to circumstances which could not be considered without a too-long digression. ”

“ Hoping, with the sanguine expectation of an inventor, that a right understanding of my plan must secure its adoption, and relying with confidence on the clearness and force of my exposition, I little knew as yet the endless complexities in the machine of Government, the deep-rooted prejudice of routine, or the countless interests ready to start up in alarm at the appearance of innovation. ”

“ Rowland Hill was, indeed, a man, to use Gibbon’s words, “whom nature had designed to think as he pleased, and to speak as he thought.” Such freedom as this is only enjoyed in its fullest extent by those who have secured “independence, that first earthly blessing.” But independence, if it is chiefly enjoyed by men of ample means, is, nevertheless, within the reach of those who have but simple wants. Yet after all there was not a little truth in what their old father wrote on hearing of this scheme of his sons: “My dear son Rowland. You and your brothers are the last men to make monks of.” ”

“ On the right of Britannia there are a brace of elephants, all backed and ready to start, when some Hindoo, Chinese, Arabic, or Turkish merchants, standing quietly by, have closed their bargains and correspondence. The elephants are symbolic of the lightness and rapidity with which Mr. Rowland Hill’s penny post is to be carried on, and perhaps, also, of the power requisite for transporting the £1,500 a-year to his quarters, which is all he obtains for strutting about the Post Office, with his hands in his pockets, and nothing to do like a fish out of water. ”

“ Indeed, it is a very great improvement in the management of the school, as from the nature of the magistrate’s reward, every one is interested in his performing his duty as much as possible to the satisfaction of the master. Another improvement in the discipline of the school is a regulation made a few months ago, which is that when a boy above the age of twelve leaves the school, a subcommittee is appointed to draw up his character, subject to the revisal of the general committee, after which it is entered in a book kept for the purpose, and read aloud before the whole school. ”

“ That a large portion of the public would thus deal with it was beyond all doubt; and would there be a yet larger or more influential body to take the opposite course? Even supposing this to be so, would the majority be sufficiently large and influential to carry Parliament with it, to constrain Government, and to overbear the Post Office; which, so far as indications went, seemed likely to put forth all its powers of obstruction?
These questions it was not easy to answer; but repeated success in innovation had inspired confidence. ”

“ I cannot join them with my voice, but I can in my heart. ‘All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.’ I leave the world bright with hope. Never, surely, has God’s government of the world been so clear as at the present period. ”

“ Every experiment in the way of reduction which has been made by the Post Office has shown its fallacy; for every reduction whatever leads to a loss of revenue, in the first instance: if the reduction be small, the revenue recovers itself; but if the rates were to be reduced to a penny, revenue would not recover itself for forty or fifty years. ”

“ One word for Ireland, my Lord. My poor countrymen do not smuggle, for the high postage works a total prohibition to them. They are too poor to find out secondary conveyances, and if you shut the Post Office to them, which you do now, you shut out warm hearts and generous affections from home, kindred, and friends. Consider, my Lord, that a letter to Ireland and the answer back would cost thousands upon thousands of my poor and affectionate countrymen considerably more than a fifth of their week’s wages ”

“ This lack of space was the more remarkable, since the building, which had been erected at enormous expense, was as yet only ten years old, and had witnessed but little increase of business within its walls.
The rooms indeed were lofty, even to the full height of the edifice, but yet ill ventilated; reminding one of what has been said by I forget whom, that, if the crowd be but dense enough, a man may be stifled even where his ceiling is the sky. ”

“ A Treasury Minute of April 22nd appointed the 6th of the following month as the day when prepayment by stamps should begin; the alternative of prepayment in money being left for the present, so as to allow time for the public to fall quietly into the new practice. Mr. Baring, indeed, having but little faith in the expected preference of the public for stamps, offered to promote their use by making them the only means of prepayment; but, independently of my confidence in their acceptability, I preferred that the two modes, money and stamps, should contend for public favour on equal terms. ”

“ The consequence is that we have none of that itching, which is so prevalent in most young people, to be always from home; and I think I may say without vanity that there is not a family in Birmingham where there is less discord than in ours. For this we are indebted to our parents, who, instead of interfering in all our undertakings, as is too common with many enlightened fathers and mothers, allow us to use our own judgment and discretion; and when we are in the wrong, rather let us find it out ourselves than by a continual interference beget a spirit of opposition in their children. ”

“ Suppose even an average yearly loss of a million for ten years. It is but half what the country has paid for the abolition of slavery, without the possibility of any money return. Treat the deficit as an outlay of capital, and those who make a serious affair of it suppose that a great nation is to shrink from a financial operation which a joint-stock company would laugh at. But enough of revenue. Even if the hope of ultimate profit should altogether fail, let us recur to a substituted tax; and if we are asked, What tax? ”

“ The labourer is worthy of his hire. The country is in your debt. An organized plan is alone necessary to insure you a national subscription of a sum of money sufficient to reimburse you for time, trouble, and annoyance incurred and expended in your great social revolution.... A public subscription—a really national one—would give you power and independence, and when the next change of Government takes place you would be in the ascendant. ”

“ In the year 1872 he asked me to examine it carefully, and to point out whatever might strike me as being defective either in its method or its execution. I found, as I told him, that the “Prefatory Memoir” was too short, and “The History of Penny Postage” too long. Too little was told of the way in which his character had been trained for the hard task which awaited it, and too much was told of the improvements which had been effected. In the case of inventors it is not so much what a man does, as how he learns to do it, and how he does it, that we all care to know. ”