Postillion

“ But your personal weight and importance as compared with that of others who it is reasonable to believe will, in the first instance at least, be opposed to you, will be measured very much by comparison of salary. We may say what we will, but Englishmen are neither aristocratic nor democratic, but chrysocratic (to coin a word) . Your salary will, therefore, if you have one at all, fix your position in the minds of every functionary of the Post Office, from the Postmaster-General to the bellman, both inclusive. ”

“ Early in 1852 my brother Frederic completed a measure adjusting the salaries of the rural sub-postmasters (about six thousand, I believe, in number) , advancing some and depressing others, according to the ascertained amount of work, and laying down a rule for the decision of all future cases. Somewhat later, the Postmaster-General having decided, on receipt of a memorial from the clerks of the Money Order Office, that their salaries should be revised, I prepared a minute, which received Lord Hardwicke’s ready sanction, and which I intended to serve as a model for other departments. ”

“ At the end of November 1874 the dissatisfied sorters drew up a respectful and moderate memorial to the Postmaster-General, pointing out that “whilst grateful for the recent improvements made in ... pay and prospects of promotion, they were yet unable to accept so small a revision as a satisfactory [107] settlement of their claims to increased remuneration,” and giving some very valid reasons for a reconsideration of their case. The petition was signed by 140 men as representative of the entire sorting force, and presented through their immediate superior. ”

“ Two months later, 27th August 1657, on a report from the Committee on the Postage, it was ordered that a lease be granted of the office of Postmaster-General to Thurloe, at a rent of £10,000, to be paid quarterly; "he to be at all charges, take no greater rates of postage than expressed in the Act, and send all Government letters free: the grant to be for as many years as His Highness thinks fit, not exceeding 11, or one life." ”

“ One evening, in his quiet simple manner, the blind Postmaster-General presented himself at the General Post-Office unannounced and asked to be taken over the sorting department, and to have things explained to him. The scene was one of bustle and confusion; and the dull roar and the clank of stamping machinery, and the movements of hundreds of [127] men in a confined space, filled the overburdened air. ”

“ Enamored of the dubious success of the Postal Department, whose wretched management has furnished a deficit for sixty years, they demand that it shall saddle itself with a telegraph service and a savings attachment. A postmaster general has so far taken leave of his senses as to suggest that the savings shall be devoted to the construction of public buildings, which would necessitate the taxation of the depositors to meet the interest paid to them, and make it impossible to provide ready money in case of a run. ”

“ My servant returned first, after an hour's absence, with an old man, the postmaster not choosing, or not being willing, to afford him any more help. We waited, therefore, for the postilion, who came at length, to our great joy, with four villagers, by whose endeavours we raised the carriage up once more, and returned to Rheine about midnight. I am most fully of opinion that the postilion did it purposely, and probably by his master's orders. The postmaster's behaviour justified this conjecture: he neither blamed the man, nor promised me any satisfaction ”

“ As we have seen in the origin of the office, he holds his appointment by patent granted under the Great Seal. The Postmaster-General has in his gift all the postmasterships in England and Wales where the salary is not less than 120l. per annum (all under that sum being in the gift of the Treasury Lords) , and to those in Ireland and Scotland where the salary is 100l. and upwards. Besides this amount of patronage, now dispensed to officers already in the service, he has the power of nomination to all vacancies in the General Post-Offices of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. ”

“ I am thankful I am not a postmaster. We now come to accounts in dozens and scores at the end of the month; to contrivances invented not only to establish, but to check and control a minute responsibility, involving a total of 50 millions of francs, made up of postages amounting on an average to 43 centimes each (less than 4d.) , and of 116 millions of letters, each of which may belong to one or other of 242 categories.
John: A very complicated simplicity truly! The man who has resolved this problem must have a hundred times more genius than your Mons. Piron or our Rowland Hill. ”

“ In consequence of this meeting, and the disturbance that ensued, another thirteen men were next day suspended from duty.
But the agitation still continued to progress, the men being supported in their academic demand for a free public platform by a section of the public press and a few public men. The leader of the Postmen’s Union now thought that he was in a position to dictate terms to the Postmaster-General, and repeated the demands of the men in an ultimatum despatched one afternoon by special messenger. ”

“ As has already been remarked, the original design in the establishment of the post-office department was that its income should be made to sustain its operations. That principle ought never to be abandoned. Whilst the department should not be regarded as a source of revenue to the nation, it never should become an annual charge to the treasury. Upon assuming the discharge of the duties pertaining to the office of postmaster-general, my first object was to investigate its financial condition ”

“ CHEAP POSTAGE. For more than eight years, the people of Great Britain have enjoyed the blessing of Cheap Postage. A literary gentleman of England, in a letter to his friend in Boston, dated London, March 23, 1848, says—“Our Post Office Reform is our greatest measure for fifty years, not only political, but educational for the English mind and affections. If you had any experience of the exquisite convenience of the thing, your speech would wax eloquent to advocate it. With your increasing population, a similar measure must soon pay ”

“ There were a number of other circumstances arising out of the growth of the kingdom and its colonial expansion, which compelled the postmaster general to take action in advance of legal authority. When the treasury, after the union of England and Scotland, learned that a new post office law was necessary, they determined to take advantage of the fact to serve their own purposes. The war of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1702, while ruinous to France, also seriously crippled England ”

“ While thus confirmed in my belief that, even from a financial point of view, the postal rates were injuriously high, I also became more and more convinced, the more I considered the question, that the fiscal loss was not the most serious injury thus inflicted on the public; that yet more serious evil resulted from the obstruction thus raised to the moral and intellectual progress of the people; and that the Post Office, if put on a sound footing, would assume the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization ”

“ It was a labour worthy of an intellectual Hercules to seek to cleanse such an Augean stable as the Post-Office, but he had done as much as it were possible for one man to dare attempt, meeting with the growls probably of the watch-dogs of the Treasury, and with little gratitude from those who benefited by the result. ”

“ The postman’s double knock at the door the next morning is ‘more germain to the matter.’ How that knock often goes to the heart! We distinguish to a nicety the arrival of the Two-penny or the General Post. The summons of the latter is louder and heavier, as bringing news from a greater distance, and as, the longer it has been delayed, fraught with a deeper interest. We catch the sound of what is to be paid—eight-pence, nine-pence, a shilling—and our hopes generally rise with the postage. How we are provoked at the delay in getting change—at the servant who does not hear the door! ”

“ The victory, however, is always on the side of the post-office: the effect of the fire from their port-holes is felt when all within its lines are quiet. The wheels of the department uninjured move on. Let us take a glance through yonder opening. We are on the outside, looking into the interior of this postal fortress. Hundreds of active business-men are moving about in their shirt-sleeves, looking fierce and desperate: they are engaged in a great struggle,—a struggle with time. ”

“ There was the tremendous enthusiasm usual with those newly awakened to a sense of their long-suffering, and the realisation of things they were yet entitled to have and to hold. There was much determination expressed, but as yet no plan to proceed upon. It was a great meeting, a splendid cohesion of kindred particles too long held asunder, but as yet there was no proposition before them. Then it was that young Clery stepped into the breach, and proposed the heroic method of ignoring the postal officials by addressing a protest to Parliament, or lying right away to the Lords of the Treasury. ”

“ Many postmasters in the West of England now petitioned the Treasury to the effect that they had been nearly ruined in the times of His Majesty King William, "through much spoiling of their horses by officers riding-post in the late blessed Revolution." Others grumble at the lowness of their salaries. ”

“ No one who was under him ever felt his self-respect wounded by his chief. It is not yet forgotten in the Post Office how, many years ago, one of the higher officers was summoned to the room of the Postmaster-General to give an explanation on some [415] difficult matter. He found his Lordship and the Secretary sitting at the table, but he himself, though he was likely to be kept some time, was not invited to take a chair. ”

“ In those days there were really no sorters, unless such as were employed in the chief office in London. As to the work being carried on under seal, it is not going beyond the truth to say that, to the great majority of persons, the interior of the Post-office is a terra incognita, their sole knowledge of the institution being derived from the pillar and the postman.
Yet the sorters of the present age, forming a very large body, are ever engaged in doing an important and by no means simple duty. ”

“ Hill had been sedulously striving from the period of penny postage, was to avoid the waste of time, trouble, and expense consequent on two different men going over the same ground to distribute two classes of letters which might, without any real difficulty, be delivered together. The greatest objection in the Post-Office itself to completing the change, arose from the different status of the two bodies of men, the one class being paid at a much higher rate of wages and with better prospects than the other class. ”

“ By the recital of a patent bearing date the 30th April of the seventeenth year of James I., we learn that the king "appointed that there should be an office or place called Postmaster of England for Foreign Parts, being out of the king's dominions; that the office should be a sole office by itself, and not member or part of any other office or place of Postmaster whatsoever ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is the object perpetually in view. Even the Postmaster-General, who is so liberal in all his ideas, says, in words which hardly do justice to the times, “As far as lay in my power, during my short administration, I have reduced the expenditures and increased the revenues of the Department.” [76] Something better than this remains to be done.
COMPLEXITY AND MULTIFARIOUSNESS IN OUR SYSTEM.
The postal system of the United States was kindred in character to that of England until the latter was transfigured by the felicitous genius of Rowland Hill. ”

“ But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And am I not encouraged to the opposite course—that of protracting my emotions—by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon, inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope, to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment? ”

“ Men on the streets and in farm houses believed that they were victims of imposition on the part of the deputy postmaster general, and that he was charging them more for the conveyance of their letters than the imperial statutes warranted, high as the legitimate charges were. ”

“ The business, too, being one which both can and ought to be conducted on fixed rules, is one of the few businesses which it is not unsuitable to a government to conduct. The post office, therefore, is at present one of the best of the sources from which this country derives its revenue. ”