Cheap Postage. Joshua Leavitt
powerful tendency of diminished cost to increased consumption. A gentleman who is interested in a certain panorama said that, in a certain case, the exhibiter wrote to him that the avails, at a quarter of a dollar per ticket, were not sufficient to pay expenses. “Put it down to twelve and a half cents,” was the reply. It was done, and immediately the receipts rose so as to give a net profit of one hundred dollars a week.
These facts prove that there is a settled law in economics, that in the case of any article of general use and necessity, a reduction in the price may be expected to produce at least a corresponding increase of consumption, and in many cases a very largely increased expenditure. So that the amount expended by the people at low prices will be fully equal to the amount expended for the same at high prices. The people of England expend now as much money for postage, as they did under the old system, but the advantage is, that they get a great deal more service for their money, and it gives a spring to business, trade, science, literature, philanthropy, social affection, and all plans of public utility.
II. Nothing but Cheap Postage will suppress Private Mails.
It is true that, in this country, private mails are not of so long standing, nor so thoroughly systematized as they were in Great Britain before the adoption of cheap postage. But on the other hand, the state of things in this country affords much greater facilities for that business, and renders their suppression by force of law much more difficult and more odious than in Great Britain.
On this head, the report of the Parliamentary Committee contains a vast mass of information, which made a deep and conclusive impression, upon the statesmen of that country. They found and declared that, “with regard to large classes of the community, those classes principally to whom it is a matter of necessity to correspond on matters of business, and to whom also it is a matter of importance to save, or at least to reduce the expense of postage, the post-office, instead of being viewed as it ought to be, and as it would be under a wise administration of it, as an institution of ready and universal access, distributing equally to all, and with an open hand, the blessings of commerce upon civilization, is regarded by them as an establishment too expensive not to be made use of, and as one with the employment of which any endeavor to dispense by every means in their power.” And among “the commercial and trading classes, by dint of the superior [pg 011] activity, had in a considerable degree relieved themselves from the pressure of this tax, without the interference of the legislature, by devising other means for the cheap, safe and expeditious conveyance of letters.” Some specimens of these expedients, as developed by the evidence before the Parliamentary Committee, will be at once curious and instructive.
M. B. Peacock, Esq., solicitor to the post-office, detailed the methods which the department had used to suppress the illicit sending of letters. By law, one half of the penalty, in cases of prosecution, went to the informer, but of late, informations were given much less frequently, and he thought the diminution of informations was owing to the fact that, about five years before, there had been a call in parliament for a return of the names of informers. He said the post-office had done all in its power to put a stop to the illegal sending, but without success. And he was decidedly of opinion, that the prevention is beyond the power of the post-office, and could only be done by reducing the rates of postage.
Mr. G. R. Huddlestone, superintendent of the ship-letter office, gave an account of the illicit sending of letters from London to the outports to go by sea. He said they were customarily sent in bags from the coffee houses, and by the owners of vessels, in the same way as from the ship letter office, and no means had been devised which could put a stop to it. Of 122,000 letters sent from the port of Liverpool in a year, by the American packets, only 69,000 passed through the post-office. The number of letters received inwards, from all parts of the world, by private ships, was 960,000 yearly; the number sent outwards through the post-office, was but 265,000. In the year ending October 5, 1837, there were forty-nine arrivals of these packets, bringing 282,000 letters. The number of letters forwarded from London by post to Liverpool for these lines, was 11,000; the number received in London from these lines, was 51,000 a year.
Mr. Banning, postmaster at Liverpool, stated that, in return for 370,000 ship letters received at his office in a year, addressed to persons elsewhere than at Liverpool, only 78,000 letters passed through that office to be sent outwards. And yet the masters of vessels assured him that the number of letters they conveyed outwards was quite equal to the number brought inwards.
Mr. Maury, of Liverpool, said that on the first voyage of the Sirius steamship to America, only five letters were received at the post-office to go by her, while at least 10,000 were sent in a bag from the consignee of the ship.
Mr. Bates stated that the house of Baring & Co. commonly sent two hundred letters a week, in boxes, from London to Liverpool, to go to America—equal to 10,000 a year.
These things were done under the very eye of the authorities, and yet no means had been found to prevent it. What police can our government establish, strict enough to do what the British government publicly declared itself unable to do?
The correspondence, of the manufacturing towns, it appeared, was carried on almost entirely in private and illicit channels. In Walsall, it was testified that, of the letters to the neighboring towns, not one-fiftieth were sent by mail. Mr. Cobden said that not one-sixth of the letters between Manchester and London went through the post-office. Mr. Thomas Davidson, of Glasgow, stated the case of five commercial houses in that city, whose correspondence sent illegally was to that sent by post in the ratio of more than twenty to one; one house said sixty-seven to one.
In Birmingham, a system of illicit distribution of letters had been established through the common-carriers to all the neighboring towns, in a circuit of fifteen miles, and embracing a population of half a million. The price of delivering a letter in any of these places was 1d., and for this the letters were both collected and delivered. Women [pg 012] were employed to go round at certain hours and collect letters. They would collect them for 2d. per hundred, and make a living by it. The regular postage to those towns was 4d., besides the trouble of taking letters to the post-office. Hence there was both economy and convenience in the illicit arrangement. The practice had existed for thirty years, and when it was brought in all its details to the notice of parliament, no man seems to have dreamed that it was in the power of the government to suppress it by penal enactments.
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