Penny Postage

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 19, 10 May 1906, Page 1

Penny Postage

Sir Joseph Ward— our southern Rowland Hill — has been defeated in his effort to secure universal penny postage. It is, nevertheless, one of the coming events which has already cast its shadow before. In the movement for imperial penny postage Sir Joseph has taken a leading and honorable part. In pressing for the wider benefit his motto will, no doubt, be : ' Nulla vestigia retrorsum '—no turning backwards. 'We shall escape the uphill by never turning back,' say a Christina G-. Rossetti. Time and circumstance work for the change. The Frenchman and the German and the Norwegian and the Italian are less able than we to pay 2£d on letters that go beyond tiveir borders ; certain anomalies oi international postage are certain to overtax the patience and .sense of proportion of the public ; and the cost of carriage of mail matter has enormously decreased since the days when the present rate between different countries was agreed upon. Time alone would work the remedy. But time is all th.c better far a touch cf the spur once in a way. And Sir Joseph Ward, like Mr. Henniker-1 lea-ton, believes in carrying the wider reform, as well as the narrower one, by a policy of pin-prioks. In this, fas in many other matters, ' it's dogged as wins.' Sir Rowland Hill plodded on resolutely for three years at his scheme of inland penny postage. And then he haid the' satisfaction of see-

ing it adopted by a majority of one hundred in the House of Commons, and s< t in operation on January 10, 1840,. * A secular contemporary has referred to the idea of the penny postage as one that originated in the braincells of Sir (then Mr.) Rowland Hill. Herein our contemporary is to error. Some years ago we showed that our penny post is merely a revival and extension of a principle that ,was in active progress in London as far back as the days of Charles 11. Sydney, in his • Social Life in England from the Restoration to the Revolution ' (pp. 227-9), establishes the fact that withinthe last two years of the Merry Monarch's loose reign, an upholsterer named Robert Murray initiated a penny post for the conveyance of both letters and parcels in London. The new system came speedily under the control of one William Docwra, who had taken over Murray's business. The regulations were— for a new and tentative private institution— of an exceedingly liberal kind. ' All letters,' says Sydney, ' which did not exceed a pound in weight, and any sum of money which did not exceed £10 in value, and any packet which did not exceed £10 in value, should be conveyed at a cost of one penny within the city and suburbs, and of two pence to any distance within a circuit of ten miles.' Six spacious post-oflices were opened at convenient centres in London, and receiving: houses were established in all the chief thoroughfares. Letter-carriers cleared the receiving houses every hour, and 'as many as six and eight timea during the course of the day deliveries of letters were effected in the busy and crowded streets in the vicinity of the Exchange. In the outlying districts of the capital there were generally four deldver^ics daily.' • / The new system worked admirably. But it was in advance of the spirit and feeling of the time. It cut into the Duke of York's big and ill-served monopoly of mail-carrying. It ahw encroached upon the business of the grimy and raucous city porters of the day. It could, however, have lived down the clamors of the Royal Duke and the (at times) lively doingfci of the opposition that arose at the other end of the social scale. It was sectarian passion that slew the first penny post. At the present juncture the story will bear a brief and summary re-telling. ' The system,' says the author already quoted above, ' was loudly dene unced by the Protestants as a contrivance on the part of notorious Papists to facilitate the communication of their plots of rebellion one to another. The infamous

Titus Oates assured the public that he was convinced of the complicity of the Jesuits in the scheme.' There was a mighty uproar in London. The Government was compelled to 'do something.' The thing it did was to fine Docwra for his display of public spirit and enterprise. Later on— three years after the accession of William lll.— he was granted a pension of £500 a year for se/ven years, by way of compensation for his loss, and for 'his services (so said the Privy Seal writ) ' in inventing and settling the business of the Penny Post Office.' This solatium probably smoothed down Docwra's ruffled feathers. But in the meantime the ' Penny Post Office ' had been strangled by the ignorant credulity and clamorous sectarian rancor which had tasted of 1 The insane root That takes the reason prisoner.' Sir Rowland Hill merely revived penny postage and widened the sphere of its benefits. Mr. HennikerHeaton and Sir Joseph Ward will, we trust, see the boon extended to every country that a civilised flag flies over.