17651784.SDTOSDTOioruiorunuennuengbbcgbbclllellleeee.eee.Distance.......d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.Not exceeding one post stage12342468Exceeding one and notexceeding two post stages246836912Exceeding two post stagesand not exceeding 80 miles36912481216Exceeding 80 and notexceeding 150 miles4812165101520Exceeding 150 miles4812166121824To and from Edinburgh61218247142128
{ The Irish Post Office had only{ recently been placed under the{ authority of the Irish Parliament;To and from Dublin{ and the rates of postage, not only{within Ireland, but between Ireland{ and Great Britain, were awaiting{ revision.
Within Scotland.(Measured from Edinburgh.)Not exceeding one post stage12342468Exceeding one post stage andnot exceeding 50 miles246836912Exceeding 50 miles and notexceeding 80 miles36912481216Exceeding 80 and notexceeding 150 miles4812165101520Exceeding 150 miles4812166121824
The same Act which increased the rates of postage imposed, or sought to impose, additional restrictions upon franking. Some concessions indeed were made. Letters from members of Parliament, in order to secure exemption, need no longer be limited, in point of weight, to two ounces and, in point of time, to the session of Parliament and forty days before and after. As part of the superscription, however, were now to be given the full date of the letter, the day, the month, and the year, all in the member's handwriting; and the letter was to be posted on the date which the superscription bore. These restrictions, it was confidently expected, would correct the worst abuses and render the concessions harmless. But, curiously enough, like the restrictions of 1764, they had an exactly contrary effect to that which was intended. The members sent to theirconstituents and friends, for use as occasion should serve, franks that were post-dated. These the Post Office charged, as coming from places where the members were known not to be. The members remonstrated, demanding to be informed in what respects the conditions of the Act had not been satisfied. The dispute waxing warm, the matter was referred to Pitt; and Pitt, after testing the opinion of the House, decided that pending fresh legislation the charges should be abandoned. Practically, therefore, the abuses which the Act was designed to prevent were not only not prevented but were given wider scope.
Palmer maintained to the end of his life that during the two years which followed the starting of the first mail-coach he was thwarted and opposed by the Post Office. This charge, so far as it refers to those by whom the Post Office was managed and controlled, we believe to be groundless. That he had difficulties with contractors and postmasters is beyond question. Contractors were at all times troublesome persons to deal with, but they were not Post Office servants; and postmasters might well be excused if they looked askance at the new plan. Their salaries, low as they were, had long been shamefully reduced by exactions at headquarters under the name of fees; and what little they had been able to make out of their allowances for riding-work was now threatened by a system under which that work was to be done by contract. But the charge was not confined to contractors and postmasters. It extended to those who controlled and directed the Post Office, to Carteret and Tankerville and to their confidential adviser, the secretary; and, as we believe, with very insufficient reason. Carteret was indifferent. Tankerville was sincerely desirous of a reform of the posts, from whatever quarter it might come. Anthony Todd, the secretary, was eminently a man of peace. Appointed to the Post Office in 1738, he had arrived at a time of life when to most men ease and quiet are essential; and not only was he well advanced in years but it was not in his nature to thwart or oppose any one. All he wanted was to be left alone; and he wasshrewd enough to know that the best way to secure this object was not to molest others.
Between Todd and Palmer, indeed, there was little in common. Palmer, in everything he undertook, was intensely in earnest. Todd, on the contrary, could with difficulty get up even an appearance of earnestness about anything which did not concern himself. Even of his duty Todd took a view which must have been absolutely repugnant to Palmer. Lloyds's coffee-house was supplied by the Post Office with the arrivals and sailings of British ships, and it paid for the information no less than £200 a year. One-half of this amount went into Todd's own pocket; and yet, according to him, the giving of the information was a concession, an indulgence. "The merchants," he would write, "are indulged with ship news." To the Mayor of Shrewsbury, who had asked on behalf of the inhabitants for an earlier post, he deliberately wrote, "The arrival of the mail a few hours sooner or later can be of no great consequence." Not many years before, a despatch sent by express from Lord North to the Duke of Newcastle had been lost. Even to the minister Todd was not ashamed to write, "I dare to say there is no roguery in the case, but [that the letter has been] lost and trampled under foot in the dirty roads." Between a man who could take this view of his duty and Palmer, who was burning to perfect his plan, there could be little sympathy; but there was certainly no active antagonism. That, as Palmer extended his plan, doubts as to its merits arose at headquarters is perfectly true; but they were honest doubts, doubts which might excusably be entertained and which, if entertained, the Post Office was bound to express. Palmer, who regarded every one who was not for him as being against him, construed the expression of a doubt into an act of hostility.
Let us see what some of these doubts were, and whence they originated. In London, before the introduction of Palmer's plan, it had been the practice to wait for the arrival of all the mails before any one of them was delivered,so that in the event of a single mail being behind time, no delivery at all might take place until three or four o'clock in the afternoon or even later. Palmer, of course, altered this. But now his interest in the Bristol coach led him to an opposite extreme. The Bristol mail was delivered the moment it arrived; and all other mails, by how little soever they might be later, were kept waiting. Again, before 1784 the post was frequently diverted from the high road in order that adjacent villages might be served. On the Bath road, for instance, although on this road there were fewer diversions than on any other in the kingdom, the post left the turnpike road between Hungerford and Marlborough in order to go through Ramsbury. Under the new arrangement it would have defeated Palmer's object to leave the direct track, if indeed the state of the roads would have admitted of it; and as the coaches could not go to the villages, the villages had to send to the coaches. Not in these cases alone was there, at first, a very general failure to effect a junction. Along every road on which a mail-coach was started the bye and cross posts were deranged and thrown into confusion; and, as a consequence, the Post Office was swamped with complaints from those whose letters had been delayed.
Had this been all, it would have been little more than might be expected in the course of transition from one system to another; but other causes of dissatisfaction arose. The Act of Parliament regulated the rates of postage according to stages—2d. in the case of a single letter, for one stage, 3d. for two stages, and beyond two stages and not exceeding eighty miles 4d.; but what was meant by the term stage the Act nowhere defined. Virtually it was in the power of one man, by the simple expedient of reducing the length of the stages and so increasing their number, to raise the rate of postage between any two towns in the kingdom that were not more than a certain number of miles apart. And this is exactly what Palmer did. From Rochester to Dartford, for instance, had been one stage. The single stage was replaced by twostages; and the postage, which had been 2d., became 3d. From Newbury to Devizes had been two stages. The two stages were increased to three; and the postage was raised from 3d. to 4d. And so it was throughout the kingdom. Well might the postmasters-general write, as they wrote under date the 7th of December 1785, "We are now at a loss in many instances how to rate letters and what to call by the name of a stage."
But not even the increase of postage which resulted from shortening the stages gave so much offence as the earlier closing of the Post Office in Lombard Street. The Post Office had from the earliest times been kept open to at least twelve o'clock at night, and probably a little later. It now closed at seven o'clock in the evening, so as to admit of the mails starting at eight o'clock. Palmer had foreseen that objections might be raised to the change; but he was little prepared for the storm of indignation that followed. The first merchants in London, some of them bearing names still honoured in the city,—Thellusson, Lubbock and Bosanquet, Herries, Quentin Dick and Hoare,—protested in writing and afterwards waited on the postmasters-general in a body to support their protest. The leather-dealers followed suit, a body representing more than sixty firms. Some held that the Post Office should be kept open till nine o'clock, and others till ten or even eleven o'clock; but all were of opinion that seven was too early an hour to close. At a meeting held at the London Tavern, and presided over by one of the sheriffs, resolutions were passed, copies of which were afterwards presented to Pitt in person, not only condemning the early hour of closing but calling for the adoption of measures with a view "to remove the inconveniences which had hitherto been experienced from the establishment of mail-coaches." No wonder if the postmasters-general doubted the merits of a plan which exposed them to these complaints.
Nor was it only from without that troubles came. The letter-carriers were grumbling and more than grumbling; and not without reason. For more than seventy years theyhad been ringing bells in the streets after the receiving houses were shut—until 1769 on the three nights of the week called grand post nights, and since that date on the bye-nights as well—receiving as their own perquisite 1d. on each letter they collected. Hence the men had made a comfortable addition to their wages of 12s. a week; and now, owing to the closing of the Post Office at seven, the emoluments derived from this source were rapidly dwindling and promised soon to disappear altogether.
Between Carteret and Tankerville differences now arose which, in view of subsequent events, it is impossible to pass unnoticed. On the break-up of the Shelburne administration in 1783, when Tankerville left the Post Office and Carteret remained, the two postmasters-general had parted with mutual expressions of regard and goodwill. A questionable transaction in which Carteret had been concerned, a transaction partaking of the nature of a corrupt bargain, had indeed come under Tankerville's notice; but he willingly attributed it to the malign influence exercised by his predecessor, Lord le Despencer. This favourable construction his later experience had induced him to modify. One case in particular which occurred soon after his return to the Post Office had aroused the most painful suspicions. On Monday the 2nd of August 1784, the same day as that on which the first mail-coach started, the Post Office of Ireland was separated from the Post Office of England. Into the reasons of this separation, being as they were political, we do not propose to enter. Suffice it to say that the Government of Ireland took advantage of the occasion to displace Armit, the secretary to the Irish Post Office, and to reappoint John Lees, who had been secretary from 1774 to 1781, when he was promoted to the War Office. On his reappointment Lees wrote to the postmasters-general in London recapitulating the conditions on which he had been appointed ten years before, and stating that to those conditions, onerous as they were, he proposed in the main to adhere. He was indeed under no obligation in the matter, for he owed his reappointment to the Irish Government;but of this circumstance he had no desire to avail himself. Armit had taken over the conditions from Lees; and Lees would now resume them from Armit. Let us see what the conditions were. In 1774 Barham, the packet agent at Dover, being compelled by ill-health to retire, was succeeded by Walcot, the secretary to the Post Office in Ireland, and Walcot was succeeded by Lees, who was new to the service. Barham, though superannuated, was during his life to receive from Walcot the full salary and emoluments of the packet agency, and Walcot was during the same period to receive from Lees the full salary and emoluments of the secretaryship. Lees was meanwhile to receive from Walcot a small allowance for acting as secretary. Thus far there was nothing unusual in the arrangement. On the contrary, it was an arrangement which in those days was very commonly made. That which was unusual, and which nowhere appeared in the official records, was an undertaking into which Lees had entered to the effect that, after Barham's death, he would make to a fourth person during that person's life an annual payment of £350. This engagement Lees, when reappointed in 1784, expressed himself unwilling to renew. He was quite prepared to resume the payment to Walcot, reduced only to the same extent as by recent legislation the secretary's emoluments had been reduced; but the reversionary payment to the gentleman whom he would designate by the initials A. B. rested on different grounds. From this he must beg to be released.
Now, who was A. B.? This was the question which Tankerville asked; and asked in vain. He could obtain no information on the subject. Meanwhile Carteret, who was extremely displeased and disquieted at the disclosure, caused an expression of his severe displeasure to be conveyed to Lees that he should have presumed to make public a transaction which was obviously designed to be private. Lees replied that, as he would be unable to keep the engagement, he was bound in honour to state so; that he had made known nothing more than was absolutely necessaryin order to obtain an acquittance, namely, that after Barham's death an annuity of £350 had been agreed to be paid to some one; but who this some one was had been, and would continue to be, a profound secret. In London it had been whispered, and more than whispered, that A. B. was Carteret himself. On this point Lees was emphatic. The transaction, he said, concerns no postmaster-general, either living or dead. "With Lord Carteret it has personally no more to do than with the King of France."
Tankerville, though profoundly dissatisfied, resolved to let the matter drop; and during the next eighteen months the feeling of distrust with which he regarded Carteret did not prevent the two postmasters-general from working together harmoniously. It was not until June 1786 that an open rupture occurred. Some furniture had been ordered for the housekeeper's apartments, and Tankerville, regarding it as of too luxurious a nature, refused to countersign the bill unless the secretary could produce a precedent for the expense. This Todd might have had some difficulty in doing, as no housekeeper had resided on the Post Office premises since the year 1740; but instead of offering an explanation to that effect he waited for the next Board meeting, and, having already procured Carteret's signature to the bill, put it before Tankerville without remark. Tankerville, who never signed a document without examining its contents, inquired whether this was not the housekeeper's bill to which he had taken exception, and, on being answered in the affirmative, told Todd that he had been guilty of a gross impropriety. Carteret, who had made no secret of his opinion that it was no part of a postmaster-general's duty to check tradesmen's accounts, took Todd's part; whereupon Tankerville, whose temper was always running away with him, observed that he would do no jobs, and that if a good understanding between himself and Carteret were only to be procured by such means he would rather that they should continue on their present terms.
The next business set down for discussion had a termination still more unfortunate. The office of comptroller of thebye and cross roads had become vacant, and Carteret, whose turn it was to appoint, had appointed Staunton, the postmaster of Isleworth. In addition to a salary of £500 a year, the appointment carried a residence in the Post Office building; and as the residence occupied by the late comptroller had by Pitt's desire been given to Palmer, Carteret proposed that Staunton should be recommended to the Treasury for an allowance of £100 a year as compensation. Tankerville, who had been in personal communication with Pitt and ascertained that he would object to an allowance for such a purpose, declined to join in the recommendation, explaining the reason. Carteret's remarks implied, or seemed to imply, a doubt whether Pitt had really been seen on the subject, as alleged. Tankerville again lost his temper. High words ensued, and the Board broke up, Carteret declaring that it was impossible they should continue to act as joint postmasters-general, and that he should at once wait upon Pitt and inform him to that effect.
Carteret was as good as his word. In three days from the date of the Board meeting at which the altercation had taken place he waited upon Pitt; and Pitt, after labouring in vain to effect a reconciliation, at length dismissed Tankerville. Tankerville, who had been in constant communication with the minister on the subject of the abuses at the Post Office, and had sedulously applied himself to their correction, was hardly less surprised than he was indignant; and restating the origin of the disagreement between himself and his colleague, he demanded to be informed in what respects he had been to blame. Pitt replied that he could not enter into the merits of the question; that all it concerned him to know was that Carteret was necessary to him in the House of Lords; and that, as Carteret had expressed himself unable to act any longer with Tankerville, it had become essential to make another arrangement.
This decision as between two colleagues, of whom one was as clearly actuated by honesty of purpose asthe other was not, a decision given too by a minister who had already established a character for purity of administration, seems so extraordinary that we must look for some further explanation. The truth we believe to be that owing to an ungovernable temper Tankerville was simply intractable, and had shewn himself to Pitt to be so. Even Todd, who with all his faults was essentially a man of peace, was unable to get on with him. "I am sorry to say," he wrote on one occasion, "your Lordship is the only postmaster-general I have not had the happiness to serve under with his perfect approbation." On another occasion he wrote to Carteret: "I have had a very unpleasant day of it. His Lordship is so completely jealous and wrong-headed, so that without entering into unpleasing particulars I had better leave him to his own thoughts." Tankerville's own letters afford evidence to the same effect. "I shall not be disposed to talk coolly on the subject of Mr. Dashwood, or hear anything you may have to say, unless you can prove him guilty of fraud, which I do not admit, but now tell you distinctly that I believe Lord Carteret has been indebted to you for that forced construction." Again, "I do not find that I cool very fast," Tankerville wrote from Brighton a week or so after the incident which had excited his ire. Ever his own worst enemy, he now spoiled a good ease, so far as it was possible to spoil it, by intemperate writing. Instead of keeping to the main question, he rambled off into side-issues which were all but irrelevant. Carteret had spoken of one interview with Pitt. Pitt had expressed himself as though there had been more than one. The point was absolutely unimportant. Yet Tankerville fastened upon it, and, declaring that one or the other must have been guilty of untruth, called upon them as men of honour to reconcile the discrepancy.
Intemperate as Tankerville's language had been, it was impossible that things should remain as they were. Nothing but a public inquiry would satisfy the justice of the case; and on this he was resolved. It was a matter ofregret to him to impeach Carteret's conduct; but there was no other method of vindicating his own. "The causes of my removal," he wrote, "shall be made as public as the injury; and, however gratified your Lordship and those in concert with you may at present feel by the success of your measures, I will take upon me to foretell that the triumph will soon be at an end. I have been removed; others will be disgraced." "When your Lordship," replied Carteret, "shall think proper to bring this matter before the public, I flatter myself my conduct will be unimpeached."
A Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry was granted, and met for the first time on the 16th of May 1787. The session terminated on the 30th of the same month. Short as the interval was, evidence enough was taken to substantiate all and more than all that Tankerville had alleged. The Committee reported that a payment of £350 a year had been exacted from Lees as a condition of his appointment as secretary to the Post Office in Ireland; that a payment of £200 a year had been similarly exacted from Dashwood, the postmaster-general of Jamaica; that, while Lees had engaged to pay only in a future event, the payment in Dashwood's case had begun from the date of his appointment; that both payments were in favour of the person who had been designated by the initials A. B.; that the transactions, though protested against at the time, had been insisted upon by Lords Carteret and Le Despencer; and that not only had no record of them been made in the official books, but they had been kept carefully concealed. The Committee further reported that scandalous abuses had been found to exist at the Post Office, abuses which should be examined into and corrected forthwith; and that of many of these the First Lord of the Treasury had been specifically informed by Lord Tankerville before the latter was dismissed.
The chief interest of the inquiry, however, centred in the question—who was A. B.? A. B. proved to be one Peregrine Treves, a so-called friend of Carteret's, who had never performed any public service either in thePost Office or elsewhere. "Are you not a Jew and a foreigner?" asked the inexorable Committee. "Yes," was the reply. "In consideration of what services," the Committee continued, "did you receive these grants?" "From friendship entirely," answered Treves.
Tankerville's prediction had been amply fulfilled. It was not he that was disgraced. Yet, curiously enough, Carteret made no sign. And even Pitt did nothing more than expedite the proceedings of a Royal Commission which was already sitting. This Commission had been appointed at his instigation some years before to inquire into the duties and the pay of certain public departments, of which the Post Office was one. It was now arranged that the Post Office was to be the next to come under review.
During these dissensions at headquarters Palmer's plan had made steady progress. Many of the irregularities inseparable from the introduction of a new system had been corrected. The cross-posts had been fitted to the mail-coaches, so that failures of connection were daily becoming fewer; and when the merchants found that answers to their letters were being received in less than half the usual time, and with a degree of punctuality never experienced before, their complaints respecting the early closing of the Post Office appear to have died away. The Post Office revenue bore evidence to the improved state of things, the net receipt during the quarter ending the 5th of January 1787 being £73,000, as against £51,000 during the corresponding quarter of 1784. According to all experience, the increase in the rates of postage should have had the effect of reducing the number of letters; but so far was this from being the case that the number of letters had increased in spite of the increase of rates. The truth is that clandestine correspondence had to a large extent ceased. There was no longer any temptation to send by irregular means, at a cost of two or three shillings, and at the risk of detection, a letter which would be conveyed at least as expeditiously and for one-third of that amount by mail-coach.
Palmer, who had to this time been assisted by persons selected by himself and not belonging to the Post Office, now bestirred himself to procure for them an established position. Public and private interests were for once identical. Hitherto there had been only three surveyors for the whole of England; and of these one had resided in London. At Palmer's instigation, England was now divided into six postal districts, and a surveyor allotted to each. A seventh or spare surveyor was held in readiness to be detached to any part of the kingdom where his services might be required. Each surveyor was to reside in the centre of his district, and his functions, shortly stated, were to keep an accurate record of the posts and of the persons under his charge, to see that these persons did their duty, to facilitate correspondence and to remedy complaints. The resident surveyorship, an appointment which had been created in 1742, was abolished as no longer necessary, Palmer himself being at hand to give what advice the postmasters-general might require. The mode of remuneration was also altered. Hitherto the surveyors had received a salary of £300 a year without any allowance for travelling, the consequence being of course that they had travelled as little as possible. For the future the salary was to be only £100; but as an inducement to them to move about within their own districts, they were to have one guinea a day when absent from their headquarters. The whole of the additional appointments were conferred upon Palmer's nominees, and for the seventh or spare surveyorship he selected Francis Freeling, a young man of promise, who during the last two years had been actively engaged in regulating the mail-coaches throughout the country.
It was about this time or a little earlier that the conditions of Palmer's own employment were, at length, definitely settled, but not by any means to his own satisfaction. His first stipulation was that, besides being absolutely free from the control of the postmasters-general, he should have a commission of 2-1/2 per cent upon allincrease in the net Post Office revenue, which should follow as the result of his own plan. Thus, the net Post Office revenue before August 1784 being estimated at £150,000, he stipulated for one-fortieth part of the excess over that amount. To this Pitt agreed; but freedom from the control of the postmasters-general was a point which it was out of his power to concede. The Act of Parliament constituting the Post Office would not admit of it. Even nominal subjection to the postmasters-general was so irksome to Palmer that he was constantly pressing that a special Act might be passed to give him perfect freedom. Nor was this all. The increase in the rates of postage which came into operation one month after the starting of the first mail-coach was estimated to produce £90,000 a year, and Pitt deemed it only reasonable that this amount should be added to the previous revenue of £150,000, making £240,000 altogether, before Palmer could be allowed to draw his percentage. Of this variation of the original understanding Palmer bitterly complained, not seeing apparently that, as the increase of rates had been recommended by himself, the complaint reflected on his own singleness of purpose in making the recommendation.
Eventually it was decided that, in addition to a commission of 2-1/2 per cent upon the net revenue in excess of £240,000, Palmer should receive a salary of £1500; but even this settlement was not arrived at without grumbling on Palmer's part, and without serious misgiving on the part of the Post Office. Pitt highly approved the percentage, holding that it would serve as a constant incentive to exertion. Tankerville, while not denying the expediency of such a mode of remuneration, questioned its legality. Under the Act of Anne, which a subsequent Act had made perpetual, the Post Office revenue was appropriated to certain specific purposes; and he doubted the propriety of diverting any part of it as a reward for services, however meritorious. Clarendon, Tankerville's successor, entertained the same scruples; and except by the postmasters-general no appointment within the Post Office could be made.Palmer's objection, on the contrary, was to the amount of salary, on the ground that £1500 did not represent the fortieth part of £90,000. Pitt declined, however, to give way; and on the 11th of October 1786 Palmer was appointed comptroller-general of the Post Office on the terms prescribed by the minister.
There can be no question that Palmer bargaining for terms is Palmer seen in his least pleasing aspect. The best that can be said is that he was candid enough not to disguise his object, which was to amass a fortune. At Bath he had in his boyhood seen Ralph Allen living in a large house and dispensing hospitality on an extensive scale, and he could not bring himself to understand why the difference between his own and Allen's remuneration should be in the inverse ratio to the value of their improvements. And not only did Palmer exhibit an unworthy jealousy of Allen, but he did that good man, as we think, an injustice. When urging his own claims on the minister, he constantly insisted that Allen, on the introduction of his plan, had no difficulties to contend with, and that he kept that plan a secret. Never was there a more untenable position. That Allen had difficulties to contend with and how he overcame them we have seen in a preceding chapter; and the charge of keeping his plan a secret is refuted by the conditions of his contract, which prevented him from giving an instruction even to his own servants until it had been submitted to headquarters. No doubt it was not known until after his death that Allen had derived from the Post Office an income of £12,000 a year. His wealth had been supposed to come from the stone-quarries he possessed on Combe Down. But this was not the contention. What Palmer insisted upon was that, while he had disclosed his plan, Allen had kept his plan secret, and that, if only on that ground, the balance of merit was on his own side.
In December 1787 the Commission of Inquiry commenced its labours. Exactly a century had elapsed since the Post Office had undergone a similar ordeal, a period too long for any public department to be left to itself; and meanwhileabuses had taken root and flourished. One hundred years before there had been no sinecures. Now the principal officers attended, some of them only occasionally and others not at all; and attendance, when attendance was given, often extended no later than to one or two o'clock in the afternoon. The receiver-general, for instance, attended on three days a week; and the accountant-general attended once or twice in three months, when the quarterly balance had to be made up. Court-post employed a deputy, to whom, out of a salary of £730, he made an annual allowance of £58. The solicitor, like court-post, was an absentee, but, unlike him, was careful not to part with even a fraction of his salary. In this case the deputy received as remuneration one-third part of the law charges incurred—a form of payment calculated more perhaps than any other to promote litigation. In the Penny Post Office were three principal officers—a comptroller, an accountant, and a collector. Of these the first two gave no attendance, and the third attended only occasionally, their duties being imposed upon the chief sorter, who, in all but salary, was practically the head of the department.
Meagre salaries were bolstered up by fees and perquisites, many of them of an outrageous character. While the senior letter-carrier was rigidly restricted to 312 candles in the year, a number not perhaps in excess of his actual requirements, there was hardly an officer reputed to be of any position in the Post Office, whether an absentee or otherwise, who was not provided with coals and candles for his private use. Although to some the supply of these articles was greater than to others, the usual annual allowance was, in the case of a subordinate, four, and, in the case of the head of a department, ten chaldron of coals, and in both cases thirty-two dozen pounds of candles. As the holder of two appointments, although he discharged the duties of only one of them, the comptroller of the bye and cross roads received a double allowance. Many commuted with the tradesmen whose duty it was to supply the articles for a money payment. Altogether theallowance to Post Office servants for their private use in town and country, and irrespective of what was consumed in the official apartments, exceeded in a single year 300 chaldron of coals and 20,000 pounds of candles.
The postmasters-general had long ceased to reside in the Post Office building; and yet to them was supplied, besides coals and candles, what was euphoniously termed tinware, by which is to be understood kitchen utensils. The expenditure on their account under the three heads during two years and a half was, for coals £2230, for candles £700, and for pots and pans £150.
Of stationery there was also a gratuitous supply for private as well as official use. One fee was a peculiarly cruel one, exacted as it was from a class of public servants who were unable to protect themselves. All postmasters whose salaries amounted to as much as £20 were forced to renew their deputations every three years, with no other object than to enrich the harpies at headquarters. On each renewal the same fee had to be paid as on appointment, namely £4:11s.; and of this amount 30s. went to each of the postmasters-general, 10s. to the secretary, 10s. to the solicitor, and 1s. to the door-keeper. The remainder was for stamp duty. Postmasters were also required to pay a fee of half a guinea before receiving a warrant to exempt them from serving in public offices. Christmas-boxes given by the merchants, and designed for the letter-carriers and other subordinates, were to a large extent appropriated by their superiors. From this source the comptroller of the foreign office, with an official income of £1300, was not ashamed to derive £34 a year. Others from the same source derived smaller amounts. Newspapers for reading were supplied in profligate profusion. One head of department was allowed for his own use two morning and five evening papers; another was paid £42:16s. a year to supply himself with what papers he pleased. All, whether absentees or not, received an annual payment under the title of drink and feast money, the lowest amount being £1:17s. and the highest £3:17s., and thiswas in addition to three or four so-called feasts given annually at the cost of the department. These with percentages on tradesmen's bills were some of the fees and perquisites which were now dragged to the light.
Out of the whole number there was only one which, besides being moderate and unobjectionable, possessed a certain interest as denoting the connection which had at one time subsisted between the Post Office and the Crown. This was a fee of 1s. received by the chief sorter at the General Post Office on the occasion of a birthday in the Royal Family; and as the Royal Family now consisted of twenty-one members, his emoluments from this source amounted to one guinea in the year.
There were two points on which the Royal Commissioners appear to have received less than full information. These were expresses and registered letters. Expresses, according to the old custom of the post, were still going at the rate of only six miles an hour, while the mail-coaches were going at the rate of eight. To this difference the Commissioners called attention; but they were silent as to the fees which some expresses paid, being apparently under the impression that all were treated alike. As a matter of fact, however, expresses had by this time been divided into two kinds—the public express and the private express. The public express, that is the express on public affairs, was allowed to pass without a fee, no doubt because the Post Office dared not impose one; but on every private express, in addition to the authorised mileage, was charged, if from London, a fee of 12s. 6d., and if from the country, a fee of 2s. 6d.; and of course in this, as in every other case, the fees were for the benefit of individuals.
On the subject of registered letters addressed to places abroad the Commissioners merely expressed the opinion that the registration fee, instead of being any longer treated as a perquisite, should be applied to the use of the public; but they nowhere stated, and perhaps had not been informed, what this fee was. It may be interesting if we supply the omission. The fee for registering a packet ofvalue was, outwards[61]21s., and inwards 5s. It seems incredible, and yet such is the unquestionable fact. For every letter registered for abroad the comptroller of the foreign office received 10s. 6d., the deputy-comptroller 4s. 6d., and six clerks 1s. apiece. One guinea for registration! And it was all the more monstrous because there can be little doubt that at one time letters had been practically registered without any fee at all. An Order in Council dated as far back as July 1556 had ordained "that the poste between this and the Northe should eche of them keepe a booke and make entrye of every letter that he shall receive, the tyme of the deliverie thereof unto his hands with the parties names that shall bring it unto him, whose handes he shall also take to his booke, witnessing the same note to be trewe." In 1603 another Order in Council passed, requiring that "every post shall keepe a large and faire leger paper booke, to enter our packets in as they shalbe brought unto him, with the day of the moneth, houre of the day or night, that they came first to his handes, together with the name of him or them, by whom or unto whom they were subscribed and directed." In 1680 Dockwra, when establishing his penny post, was careful to provide that letters on reaching any one of his seven sorting offices should be "entered"; and in a mere detail of treatment, it may well be believed, he followed the practice of the general post. In 1707 letters from abroad arriving at Harwich were not to be forwarded to the Court at Newmarket until the addresses had been copied. And more than this. In 1709 two letters between London and Ostend had been delayed, and it became important to discover where the delay had occurred. "We find them," wrote the postmasters-general, "both duly entered in Mr. Frowde's books, and are satisfy'd they were regularly dispatched from this office." Now Mr. Frowdewas comptroller of the foreign office. It may be added that, small as was the force employed at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, it is difficult to account for the length of time which was then occupied in dealing with a mere handful of letters except on the hypothesis that there was a good deal more to be done than to sort and to tax them. And now the Post Office, upon no better authority than its own will, was exacting a fee of 21s. and 5s., according as the letter was outwards or inwards, for doing what some eighty years before had been done for nothing. The sums extorted from the public under this head were in 1783 £121, and in the following year £240.
As regards the working arrangements, Palmer, in virtue of the power he possessed as comptroller-general, had already corrected those that were most faulty. Until lately, the letter-carriers' walks had been so extensive that many of the deliveries could not be accomplished within five or six hours. Palmer had arranged that no delivery should occupy more than two hours or two hours and a half at the utmost, counting from the time of despatch from the General Post Office. It had been the practice for the junior clerks, the clerks with the least experience, to sort the letters for delivery, the consequence being that they reached the letter-carriers' hands in so confused a state that they had to be sorted again. Hence it had been by no means unusual for an interval of four or five hours to elapse between the arrival of the last mail and the going out of the letter-carriers. By appointing some of the most intelligent letter-carriers to sort the letters in the first instance, Palmer had reduced the interval to one hour on ordinary, and to one hour and a half on extraordinary occasions. As many as 400 postmasters had returned their letter-bills in one week, and on the plea of having been overcharged had claimed and been allowed deductions. Palmer had checked this abuse by arranging that in the case of those postmasters who were in the habit of returning their letter-bills the charges should be twice told. He had also reduced theamount expended on extra duty by £2000 a year. Heretofore, if a man had chosen to absent himself, the Post Office had provided a substitute. For the future the substitute was to be provided at the absentee's own expense.
But although Palmer had already corrected the most faulty of the arrangements, some still existed which could not be pronounced good. The accountant-general was intended to be a check upon the receiver-general; yet, instead of keeping an independent record of the sums received, he merely transcribed or caused to be transcribed the entries from the receiver-general's books. The accountant-general, again, was required to certify every bill before the postmasters-general passed it for payment; but as he was not empowered to call for vouchers or for the authority under which the expenditure had been incurred, his certificate conveyed nothing more than that the bill had been rightly cast. The accounts themselves appear to have been rendered in the strangest manner. The article "Dead Letters," for instance, was made to serve a variety of purposes. Under this article postmasters were accustomed to claim chaise-hire, law charges, and even pensions to private persons.
The packet service was a part of the Post Office which the Commissioners would fain have avoided if they could; but the public voice was too strong for them. The enormous expenditure which this service involved had long excited murmurs, and the opportunity which now offered of investigating the causes of it was one which could not with any regard to propriety be missed. Accordingly the inquiry was entered upon; but with a desire to restrict it as far as possible the Commissioners did not extend their investigations beyond the packet station at Falmouth, where more than three-fourths of the expenditure was incurred. To ourselves, who are under no obligation to observe a similar limit, perhaps a little more latitude may be allowed.
The continental mails by way of Dover and Harwich went at this time only twice a week; and by a curiousarrangement these mails started from the General Post Office at midnight, although the inland mails for the same towns and going by the same route started at eight o'clock in the evening. At Harwich the packet station had abandoned itself to smuggling. In 1774 two packets, theBessboroughand thePrince of Wales, were seized for having contraband goods on board. Not a single voyage had these packets made during the last two years without committing a similar infringement of the law. The Commissioners of Customs, whose patience was exhausted, now commenced proceedings in the Court of Exchequer, and were prevailed upon to abandon them only upon the captains, who were also owners of the vessels, paying by way of fine two-third parts of their appraised value—amounting to £306 in one case and to £272 in the other—of which sums one-half was to go to the Crown and one-half to the officer by whom the goods had been discovered. This high reward was not long in reproducing the occasion on account of which it had been given. In November 1777 another seizure took place, this time of three packets simultaneously, two of them being the same as had been seized in 1774. The third was theDolphin. On this occasion the Commissioners of Customs determined that the vessels should be prosecuted to condemnation. In vain the postmasters-general urged that the law was a hard one which made the captains responsible for offences which, it was alleged, they had done their best to check. The customs authorities were inexorable. It was not long, however, before the Post Office became possessed of certain facts which, when investigated, proved beyond a doubt that there had for years past been collusion of the grossest character. On every voyage contraband goods—chiefly tea, coffee, and gin—had, with the connivance of the local officers of customs, been imported in large quantities; and of these only a part, a comparatively small part, had been seized. Thus, the Post Office servants received from the goods that were left to them ample, and more than ample, compensation for those that were taken away; and the servants of the customs received from theirBoard in London both credit and reward for their vigilance. Nor was it by any means certain that the seizure of the packets in 1774 and again in 1777 was not another phase of the same collusive arrangement.
At Falmouth the case was somewhat different. Smuggling, indeed, was going on there just as it was at Harwich. As far back as 1744 the customs had issued process against the captains of two of the Falmouth packets for having contraband goods on board. The case is only worthy of mention as shewing the loose notions which at that time prevailed even in high quarters on the subject of clandestine traffic. The postmasters-general of the day, Lord Lovell and Sir John Eyles, told the Board of Customs in so many words that their conduct was unhandsome. It was vain, they urged, to endeavour to prevent "these little clandestine importations and exportations" on board the packets; and if violent measures were to be resorted to, as in the present instance, no captain "of real worth and character" would be found to command, and "no fit and able" seamen to serve. Again, in 1776 theGreyhoundpacket was seized at the port of Kingston in Jamaica for attempting to smuggle spirits. Early in 1788 theQueen Charlottepacket was condemned and sold at the same port and for the same cause. In 1786 a special agent sent down to Falmouth by Tankerville reported that, according to common repute, no packet either proceeded on a voyage or returned from one without hovering about the coast for the purpose of shipping or unshipping goods.
But, rife as smuggling was, it was something more than an infringement of the customs laws that now brought the packet station at Falmouth into notoriety. During the seventeen years ending the 5th of April 1787, the cost of the packets had exceeded £1,038,000; and of this amount about £800,000 had been expended at Falmouth. At the present day, when a single mail steamer costs perhaps as much as £300,000, the sum of £1,000,000 sterling would not go far to create and maintain a fleet; but a century ago it was considered,even when spread over a period of seventeen years, an enormous expenditure, an expenditure such as, in the language of the Royal Commissioners, almost to surpass credibility. And certainly there seems to have been good ground for this opinion. The packets altogether were only thirty-six in number, of which twenty-one were stationed at Falmouth. These were of no more than 200 tons burthen, and were navigated with thirty men, five of them being the property of the Post Office and fifteen being hired. For each of the hired boats was paid the annual sum of £2129, and for each of the others the annual sum of £1529, these sums including the charge of manning and victualling. The sixteen packets stationed elsewhere than at Falmouth were hired at ridiculously low prices, at Dover for £412 a year each, at Harwich for £469, and at Holyhead for £350. To expend upon the packets under such conditions as these more than £1,000,000 sterling in the course of seventeen years required no small amount of ingenuity. How was it managed? This was the question which the Royal Commissioners now set themselves to solve.
The grossest abuses were found to exist. The hire of the packets had been paid when they were under seizure for smuggling, and under repair, and even when they were building. In the case of packets that were building and under repair the victualling allowance paid when there were no men to victual had amounted in twelve years and a half to £56,000. When packets had been taken by the enemy the hire of them had been paid for months beyond the date of their capture; and this was in addition to compensation to the owners, which, however old and rotten the packet might be, was fixed at her original value when taken into the service. Compensation to the captains had also been given for the loss of their private property and of provisions. For provisions the compensation had always been as for six months' supply, although the supply that was actually on board might not be enough for one month; and for their private property the captains had been compensatedat their own valuation. Whatever they had asked they had received without examination and without question. This astounding prodigality indulged in at the expense of the State is easily explained. The Post Office servants in London, down even to the chamber-keeper, had shares in the packets; and of these servants the one who possessed by far the largest number of shares was Anthony Todd, the secretary. Todd also received a commission of 2-1/2 per cent upon the entire sum expended on the packet establishment of the kingdom. Thus, the very man whose duty it was to check the expenditure had a direct personal interest in making the expenditure as high as possible.
The salary of the Secretary to the Post Office remained, as it was fixed in 1703, at £200 a year; and whatever Todd received over and above that amount, he received without authority. Let us see what his actual receipts were. In addition to his proper salary of £200, he had what was called a bye salary of £75. Bye had at one time meant out of course or clandestine; and this meaning would perhaps not be inappropriate here. He had for coach hire £100 a year. He had another £100 a year from Lloyds's coffee-house. He had from fees on commissions and deputations £154 a year. He had every year twenty chaldron of coal and twelve dozen of wax and sixty-four dozen of tallow candles, valued by himself at £103. He had an unfurnished residence with stables in the Post Office building; and he received annually from the East India Company eight pounds of tea and two dozen of arrack. But this was by no means all. As former clerk in the foreign branch, an appointment which he still retained, he had a salary of £50 and an allowance of £100 a year for so-called disbursements, which he never made. He had also, in his capacity of clerk, £15 a year for coach-hire and ten chaldron of coal and thirty-two dozen of candles, valued at £40. Besides all this, he had his commission of 2-1/2 per cent upon the entire packet expenditure of the country, from which source he derived in the year 1782 no less than £2136. Altogether, Todd's modest salary of £200 a year had, by his ownunaided exertions, been converted into an annual income of more than £3000.
The extent of Todd's emoluments, his commission on the packet expenditure, the outrageous character of some of the fees and perquisites which he and others were receiving, the absenteeism, the abuses generally—all this had long been known to Pitt. Much he had heard from Tankerville, and still more, probably, from Palmer. But before either Palmer or Tankerville became connected with the Post Office, Pitt had been aware of many, if not most, of the abuses which prevailed there. As early as 1782 one of his first acts after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Shelburne administration was to give peremptory orders that no more packets were to be either built or purchased without Treasury authority. For such authority it had hitherto been the practice to ask before setting up new packets, but not before replacing old ones—packets that were worn out or alleged to be worn out, or that had been lost or captured. This was a distinction which had existed since packets were first established, and to which, nearly a hundred years before, Cotton and Frankland had attached great importance. It was now to exist no longer. In 1783 Pitt called for a return of the fees and perquisites received at the Post Office, and it was not until after this return had been furnished and possibly in consequence of it that the Commission of Inquiry was appointed. "Did you ever communicate this transaction to Mr. Pitt," inquired the Parliamentary Committee in 1787. "I did," replied Tankerville, "but found him not ill-informed on the subject in general."
It may seem strange that with the knowledge which he unquestionably possessed respecting the prevalent abuses Pitt should have allowed them to go on so long uncorrected. The explanation we believe to be twofold. In the first place he was unwilling to do or suffer to be done anything which might interfere with the introduction of Palmer's improvements. This was a point on which Pitt never ceased to betray the utmost anxiety. To embark onany general system of reform might conflict with the new plan. Let the plan be established first and the abuses could be corrected afterwards. Hence it was, no doubt, that of all the public offices to be inquired into, the Post Office, in spite of the notoriety which its abuses had acquired, was taken last. But this, although the primary explanation, was not, we suspect, the only one. Incorrupt himself, Pitt was extraordinarily tolerant of corruption in others. Witness his defence of Melville. Even of Carteret's transaction with Peregrine Treves he could never be brought to admit more than that it was not a proper one. This tolerance in others of what he would have scorned to do himself we attribute to a conviction on his part that abuses were less to be charged against individuals than as the result of a bad system which made the abuses possible; and what, if we mistake not, Pitt had proposed to himself was to bring to bear upon this system the force of public opinion. A ruthless exposure, we have little doubt, had been in contemplation; and yet when the time for exposure came, Pitt held back. Whether it was that the abuses proved too flagrant to be published with safety or that their correction would involve more time or more money than could then be spared, the fact remains that, after receiving the report of the Commission, Pitt locked it up in his despatch box and kept it there for the space of four years; and not even the postmasters-general could procure a copy.
But secret as the report of the Commission was kept, the procedure at the Post Office was about to undergo a radical change. A change indeed had already begun. Tankerville, on his dismissal in August 1786, had been succeeded by Lord Clarendon; and Clarendon died in the following December. Then followed an interval of eight months, during which Carteret alone administered the Post Office and, as was usual on such occasions, drew the double salary. At length, as Carteret's colleague, Pitt appointed Lord Walsingham; and from that moment irregularity and disorder were at an end. Nothing escaped Walsingham's vigilant eye. To neglect or evasion of work he shewed nomercy. The man honestly striving to do his duty had no better friend. His industry and power of work were simply amazing. All instructions were prepared by him. Not a single letter of any importance was received at the Post Office without the answer to it being drafted in his own hand. Generous to a fault with his own money, he regarded the money of the public as a sacred trust, a trust which could not be discharged too scrupulously. Carteret's opinion was well known, that it was no part of a postmaster-general's duty to check accounts. Walsingham, on the contrary, would allow no account to be passed until he had checked it; and his checking went a good deal beyond the casting. Unless the articles were necessary and the charges reasonable, and unless they were proved to be so to his satisfaction, the account had a sorry chance of being passed. The official hours of attendance had hitherto been pretty much what each man chose to make them. To Walsingham all hours were alike; and at all hours he exacted attendance from others. "It is utterly impossible," wrote the head of one department, "for the accounts to be ready for your inspection to-morrow evening." "I will not fail," wrote the head of another, "to do myself the honour of waiting upon your Lordship to-morrow morning at eight precisely."
Walsingham, on entering upon his duties at the Post Office, was concerned to find that to documents requiring to be signed by the two postmasters-general Carteret attached his signature first. Carteret's peerage dated from 1784, and Walsingham's from 1780. Surely the peer of older creation should sign first; and such, Walsingham found on inquiry, had been the practice hitherto. Pitt, though overwhelmed with business, was called upon to decide the momentous question. He was sorry, he said, that in the preparation of the patent the practice of the Post Office had been overlooked. It was a strange practice, a practice different from that of all other public offices. There the senior, the one who was first to enter the office, took precedence of the junior whatever his rank; and Carteret having been mentioned first in the patent mustunquestionably sign first. But this, he added, need not be drawn into a precedent, and, on a new patent passing, the old practice of the office might be reverted to. We may here mention that a few years later the Earl of Chesterfield became Walsingham's colleague; but on that occasion Walsingham does not appear to have raised the question again or to have been unwilling to conform to the new practice. And, indeed, whether Walsingham signed before or after Carteret must to every one except himself have appeared of the least possible importance. Sign in what order he might, Walsingham's influence soon became paramount. Carteret might give what instruction he pleased, but unless endorsed by Walsingham a Post Office servant obeyed it at his peril. Walsingham, on the contrary, gave instructions without reference to his colleague, and exacted prompt and implicit obedience.
With many of the qualities of a great man, Walsingham was strangely wanting in one particular. He had no sense of proportion. A trivial point hardly deserving of a moment's consideration he would elaborate as carefully as a measure involving large and important issues; and a clerical error or a slight indiscretion he would visit as severely as misconduct of the gravest character. Nor must we omit to mention a habit in which he indulged to an extent that has probably never been surpassed. This was a habit of annotating. Nothing came officially before him, whether a letter or a report or a book, without being covered in the margin and every available space with notes and queries; and, to add to the distraction which this mode of criticism seldom fails to cause, they were in so small and crabbed a hand as to be always difficult, and sometimes even with the aid of a magnifying-glass impossible, to decipher.
There was only one person that had the slightest influence with Walsingham. This was Daniel Braithwaite, who, holding nominally the situation of clerk to the postmasters-general, was really their private secretary. Braithwaite was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Of consummatetact and judgment, and endowed with a peculiar sweetness of disposition, he contrived during difficult times to tone down asperities and to accommodate many a dissension which promised to become acute. Passing through his hands a harsh admonition was turned into a gentle reproof, and an imperious command into a courteous message. But under this softness of manner and a deference of language so profound that even Walsingham quizzed him on the number of "Lordships" he would introduce into a single letter, there lay concealed a solidity of character which few would have suspected. Honest Braithwaite he was called, and well he deserved the epithet. By a simple inquiry, a request for information or the expression of a doubt, he would nip some wild project in the bud, and, where occasion required, he would not hesitate to speak his mind freely. A young man, Stokes by name, who had been appointed to assist Braithwaite, had miscopied a date in one of Walsingham's numerous drafts, or rather, feeling sure that the date as it stood was wrong, had altered it to what he believed to be the right one. Walsingham, who was absent from London at the time, wrote back that Stokes was to be suspended. Braithwaite's sense of justice was shocked, and he refused to carry the order into effect. "If a mistake in copying," he wrote, "deserves so severe a punishment as suspension, what am I not to fear for disobedience, and yet I really cannot execute the task your Lordship has imposed upon me. For God's sake, my dear lord," he proceeded, "let me most earnestly entreat you to mitigate the severity of this sentence, and, if a reprimand at the Board is not sufficient, give poor Stokes a holiday and impose the fine for a substitute upon me. At any rate," he added, "pray leave the case to be decided at a Board or refer it to Mr. Todd." Walsingham did refer the case to Todd, but not before he had sternly demanded of his refractory henchman whether he had never read Beccaria on Crimes and Punishments. "No," replied Braithwaite, "I have not read Beccaria on Crimes and Punishments; but Beccaria, say what he may, willnever convince me that it can be right to punish a mistake as though it were a crime." Honest Braithwaite! He prevailed in the end, and stood in Walsingham's confidence even higher than before.
At a Board meeting on the 20th of July 1787, less than a fortnight after taking up his appointment, Walsingham in the presence of the captains who were ashore, and who had been summoned to London for the occasion, gave notice of his intention to reduce the packet establishment at Falmouth. That establishment consisted of twenty-one boats of 200 tons each, and manned by thirty men. It was proposed that for the future there should be twenty boats of 150 tons each, and with a complement of eighteen men. These boats would cost about £3000 apiece to build, and would not be the property of the Government. The Government would simply hire them, giving as the price of hire £1350 a year, which was to cover everything, wages and victualling included. The owners would also have the passage money, estimated at £150, for each boat. Large as this reduction was, the Treasury desired that it should be carried further, that only the boats to America should be of as much as 150 tons, and that those for the West Indies and for Lisbon should be of 100. The captains, who had not relished the proposed reduction even to 150 tons, were half-amused and half-indignant. Why, they asked, should the boats for America be the largest? Were hurricanes unknown in the West Indies? And could not the Bay of Biscay boast of tremendous seas? Boats of 100 tons would be positively dangerous. No passenger would go by them; nor would any merchant trust them with bullion, from the freight of which the Post Office derived a considerable income.
The postmasters-general had also on their side the result of experience. In 1745, when the packet service to the West Indies, which had ceased in 1711, was re-established, boats of 100 tons had been tried and had proved to be altogether insufficient. Moreover, it was in the highest degree important, as a meansof checking smuggling, that the boats should not be restricted to one route. The intention was that they should be interchangeable, so that their port of destination should be uncertain; and to this end the tonnage of one should be the tonnage of all. The Treasury appear to have remained unmoved by these representations. At all events no decision was received; and Walsingham, after waiting for what he no doubt considered an unreasonable time, took silence for assent and proceeded to carry his recommendations into effect.
The economical results which had been looked for were not immediately realised. The boats hitherto in use may not perhaps have been built with the view of facilitating smuggling; and yet, crowded as they were between decks with cupboards, they could hardly have been better adapted to the purpose. In the new boats no receptacles were to be allowed in which clandestine goods could be concealed; the holds were to be only large enough to contain the stores and provisions for the voyage; the seamen were no longer to remain unrestricted as to the size and number of their boxes; and in other respects stringent regulations were laid down to prevent illicit traffic. Finding what they called their ventures stopped, the crews of the packets refused to go to sea without an increase of pay all round. These ventures, they contended, had been recognised from time immemorial and went in place of so much wages. How else would it have been possible for them, many of them men with wives and families, to subsist on a pittance of 23s. a month? The Post Office was forced to yield to the demand; and as the immediate result of his first essay in the cause of economy, Walsingham had the mortification of seeing the cost of the packet establishment increased by more than £2300 a year.
From Falmouth Walsingham turned his attention to other ports where packets were stationed. At Dover and at Harwich the establishments were too small to admit of any reduction. At the latter port, indeed, what littlechange took place was on the side of increase, the victualling allowance being raised from 7-1/2d. a day for each man to 9d., so as to be uniform with that given at Falmouth; and for the same reason the seamen's wages were raised from 23s. a month to 28s.
With Holyhead the case was different. Here Walsingham had resolved upon making a reduction, and it was only on an earnest remonstrance from the Marquis of Buckingham, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, that he abandoned his intention. The Holyhead packets were at this time five in number, and they were of seventy tons each and carried twelve hands. Walsingham held that this tonnage and complement of men were more than enough; and Buckingham maintained a directly contrary opinion. Between England and Ireland, he urged, the number of passengers was increasing every year, and surely this was not a time to lessen the confidence of the public in the security of the packets. The danger of navigation in those seas could not, he felt sure, be appreciated. He had himself crossed the Channel in all weathers. Once he had been nearly lost, and not on that occasion alone he had seen the crews, though at their full complement, absolutely prostrate with their exertions. Could it be known that, for purposes of passenger traffic, the captains of the Holyhead packets had recently built and fitted out at their own expense a sloop named theDuchess of Rutland; and that for this sloop, which, although vastly superior in point of accommodation to any one of the packets, was of no higher tonnage, the complement had been fixed at twelve hands? This would shew what was the opinion on the point of those who were most competent to judge. The fact, moreover, that Ireland had undertaken to pay to Great Britain the sum of 2d. on every letter passing to and fro placed the English Post Office under a sort of moral obligation not to reduce the amount of accommodation and security existing at the time the undertaking was given. Such were the arguments by which Buckingham prevailed upon Walsingham to abandon his intention. He at the same time hintedthat there were other objects to which Walsingham's energies might more properly be directed. "Does your Lordship know," he asked, "that an immense communication of letters is kept up by the Liverpool packets[62]which sail weekly to Dublin?"
One line of packets remains, the line between Milford Haven and Waterford. Here five boats were employed, of which three were of eighty tons and the others somewhat less; and the service was six days a week. This, though the youngest of the packet stations, was by no means the least interesting. It had been opened in April 1787; and in the first year the proceeds from passengers alone amounted to more than £1200. No doubt had been entertained that in the matter of letters there would be an equally satisfactory account to render; but it soon became evident that all hopes on this score must be given up. The Irish Post Office was no longer subject to the Post Office of England; and in the supposed interests of Dublin, which regarded with jealousy the postal facilities enjoyed by the southern towns, advantage was taken of this freedom from control to checkmate the new service. From Waterford the post for Cork had been used to start at two o'clock in the afternoon, an hour most convenient for the packets. Under orders from Dublin it was now to start at twelve; and, as shewing the vexatiousness of the proceeding, an express leaving Waterford as late as four o'clock would overtake the mail at Carrick, a distance of no more than fifteen miles. Under the same orders Limerick was forbidden to send letters by way of Waterford; and the post between this town and Clonmel was reduced from six days a week to three. This was a state of things which, under the system of Home Rule then existing, Walsingham was powerless to remedy. He could only lift his hands in amazement that such perversity should be possible.