The History of the Post Office Part 21

+-----------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+------+ Single. Double. Treble. Ounce. +-------+-------+-------+------+ _d._ _d._ _d._ _d._ +-------+-------+-------+------+ Not exceeding 15 miles 4 8 12 16 Above 15 and not exceeding 20 miles 5 10 15 20 " 20 " 30 " 6 12 18 24 " 30 " 50 " 7 14 21 28 " 50 " 80 " 8 16 24 32 " 80 " 120 " 9 18 27 36 " 120 " 170 " 10 20 30 40 " 170 " 230 " 11 22 33 44 " 230 " 300 " 12 24 36 48 " 300 " 400 " 13 26 39 52 " 400 " 500 " 14 28 42 56 " 500 " 600 " 15 30 45 60 " 600 " 700 " 16 32 48 64 Above 700 miles 17 34 51 68 +-----------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+------+

This is the highest point to which the rates of postage have ever attained in this country. Freeling would have resented so much as a suggestion that the inst.i.tution which had now for some years been under his exclusive management was not in the most perfect order to which human foresight and ingenuity could raise it; and yet to the dispa.s.sionate observer it may be permitted to doubt whether eighty years ago the Post Office was not in some important particulars more open to criticism than at any time since its first establishment.

Let us compare for a moment the beginning of the nineteenth with the end of the seventeenth century. In 1695 the postage from London to Liverpool or to York or to Plymouth was, for a single letter, 3d.; in 1813 it was 11d. In 1695, wherever letters were being carried clandestinely, the policy was to supplant; in 1813 the policy was to repress. In 1695 the King would not consent to a single prosecution even for the sake of example; in 1813, when the Post Office revenue had pa.s.sed from the King to the people, prosecutions were being conducted wholesale. In 1695 a circuitous post would be converted into a direct one, even though the shorter distance carried less postage; in 1813 a direct post in place of a circuitous one was being constantly refused on the plea that a loss of postage would result. In 1695 London enjoyed the advantage of a penny post, and this post carried up to one pound in weight; in 1813 the penny post had been replaced by a twopenny and threepenny one, and, except in the case of a packet pa.s.sing through the general post, the weight was limited to four ounces. In 1813, moreover, the complications were bewildering. In some places there were fifth-clause posts, and in others penny posts; and the charge by these posts was in addition to the charge by the general post. Some towns, over and above all other charges, paid an additional 1d. on each letter for the privilege of the mail-coach pa.s.sing through them. Of two adjoining houses one might receive its letters free of any charge for delivery and not the other. This difference was to be found in towns where building was going on--as, for instance, at Brighton--old houses being considered within, and new houses without, what was called the usage of delivery.

In London itself the complications, if possible, were more bewildering still. The threepenny post began where the twopenny post ended. Thus far the practice was simple enough. But the general post limits did not coincide with the limits of the twopenny post: and the limits of both the twopenny post and the general post differed from those of the foreign post. Indeed, it is probably not too much to say that in 1813 there was not a single town in the kingdom at the Post Office of which absolutely certain information could have been obtained as to the charge to which a letter addressed to any other town would be subject. More than ten years later Post Office experts examined before a Committee of the House of Commons were unable to state what, even on letters delivered in London, would in certain cases be the proper postage.

It may here be asked how it was that with rates so oppressive and so vexatiously levied the public were induced to tolerate them. The mail-coaches were popular except with the road trustees; and there is reason to think that even these, or at all events the princ.i.p.al persons among them, only professed a dislike which they did not really feel. The Post Office packets were also popular, and well they deserved to be, distinguishing themselves as they were about this time by deeds of even more than usual daring.

But these considerations, added to the personal popularity which Freeling himself enjoyed, are altogether insufficient to account for the extraordinary patience of the public under the treatment which eighty or ninety years ago they endured at the hands of the Post Office. The explanation we believe to be that the heavy rates of postage, and not a few of the vexations incidental to the levying of them, were tacitly accepted as a part, a necessary part, of the load of taxation which the people were called upon to bear as a consequence of the war in which England was engaged. We further believe that, in respect to its acts of aggression, the Post Office escaped criticism mainly because its proceedings, irritating as they were to individuals, were not generally known. This want of publicity is specially noticeable in the matter of prosecutions. At the present day a single prosecution undertaken by the Post Office would be the subject of comment in every newspaper in the kingdom. Eighty or ninety years ago, numerous as the Post Office prosecutions were, there was not a newspaper in the kingdom that gratuitously published particulars or even announced the fact. Often did the postmasters-general lament this reticence, believing as they did that to make known their repressive measures, and the amount of penalties inflicted, must have a deterrent effect upon the illicit traffic; and at length, for want of any better means of securing publicity, they gave directions that, wherever a prosecution took place, hand-bills giving full particulars were to be struck off and affixed to the doors of the local inns.

The question which two years before had agitated the minds of the road trustees was now revived in Scotland. Among those who pressed for the establishment of mail-coaches none were more persistent than the large landed proprietors north of the Tweed; and as soon as their demands were acceded to, none were louder in their denunciations of the injustice which exempted mail-coaches from toll. The Government yielded at length to the pressure that was brought to bear, and in 1813 an Act was pa.s.sed repealing, so far as Scotland was concerned, exemption from toll in the case of mail-carriages with more than two wheels. The same Act, in order to indemnify the Post Office for the loss it would thus sustain, imposed an additional postage of 1/2d. upon every letter conveyed by mail-coach in Scotland.

The Post Office was not quite fairly treated in this matter. No sooner had the Act pa.s.sed than the trustees of the roads raised the tolls. At the old rates the mail-coaches, had they not been exempt, would have had to pay 6865 a year; at the new rates, now that they were exempt no longer, they had to pay 11,759 a year, or more by nearly 6000 than the additional 1/2d. of postage had been estimated to yield. Nor was this all. Some of the Road Acts contained a clause empowering the trustees to demand the sum of 1d. for every outside pa.s.senger. This power had never yet been exercised; but now the demand was rigorously enforced in the case of pa.s.sengers by the mail-coaches, and by these coaches only.

Thus unhandsomely dealt with, the Post Office proceeded to do in Scotland what under other circ.u.mstances it had done two years before in England. It reduced the number of its coaches. This excited many murmurs. From Glasgow, for instance, a mail-coach had been running through Paisley to Greenock. This was now replaced by a horse post, and the district was not only relieved from the payment of the additional postage of 1/2d. a letter, but--a boon which had long been earnestly sought--was given three posts a day instead of two. Yet all three towns refused to be comforted, and bitterly reproached the postmasters-general for depriving them of their mail-coach. The convenience of travellers, however, was not a matter of which the Post Office took any account. The Post Office was concerned with the transmission of letters; and wherever these could be transmitted with the same or nearly the same expedition and at less expense by other means, the mail-coaches were discarded.

About this time two measures were introduced which shew a strange forgetfulness of what had gone before. Of these one was a reorganisation of the returned letter office, and the other the pa.s.sing of a fresh Ship Letter Act. Hitherto, of the letters which could not be delivered only those had been returned to the writers which contained property or enclosures of apparent importance. The others had been torn up and sold as waste paper. Now all were to be presumed to be of importance to the writers and to be returned accordingly. The propriety and even the legality of charging such letters had been questioned in Palmer's time, and Pitt had decided that they were not to be charged. This was now forgotten, and the Post Office proceeded not only to return every letter that could not be delivered, but to charge it with postage. To Freeling, who regarded the Post Office as a mere engine of taxation, the temptation was no doubt a strong one. The measure, before being definitively adopted, had been tried experimentally for one year; and it was found that out of 189,000 letters returned to the writers more than 135,000 were accepted, producing a clear revenue of 4421.

By the new Ship Letter Act the charge on a single letter arriving by private ship was raised from 4d. to 6d., and, what was far more important, no letters were to be sent by private ship except such as had been brought to the Post Office to be charged. The directors of the East India Company, who would seem to have strangely overlooked the bill during its pa.s.sage through the House, implored the Government to get the Act repealed. It was true, they urged, that their official correspondence was exempted from the operation of the Act; but dependent on them in the East was a small army of servants whose private letters had hitherto gone free, and, under the provisions of the Act, would go free no longer. With the East Indies there was no communication by packet, and surely it was introducing a new principle for the Post Office to make a charge where it did not perform a service. Did not the charge in such a case become a mere tax upon letter-writing?

Freeling, on the other hand, maintained that no new principle was involved, inasmuch as the previous Act, the Act of 1799, recognised the sending of letters by ships other than packet boats and charging them with postage. This was perfectly true; but he forgot to add that, whereas the Act of 1799 was permissive, the Act of 1814 was compulsory, that under the one Act it was optional with the senders of letters whether they would take them to the Post Office or not; and under the other, if they did not take them to the Post Office, they rendered themselves liable to severe penalties. He might indeed have gone further, and said that in 1799 Pitt and the whole of the administration of which Pitt was the head scouted the very idea of anything in the shape of compulsion being employed in the matter.

The Ship Letter Act of 1814 proved a complete failure. It contained no provision obliging private ships to carry letters, and the private ships between England and India were almost entirely in the hands of the East India Company. No wonder, therefore, that the Company, when asked whether it might be announced to the public that bags would be made up at the Post Office to be conveyed by their ships, replied in the negative. The Court of Directors, their letter said, are not without hopes that Parliament will consent to revise the Act, and meanwhile they "do not see fit to authorise the commanders or owners of any of their ships to take charge of any bag of letters from the Post Office subjected to a rate of postage for sea conveyance." Freeling was filled with dismay. "A vital impediment," he exclaimed, "to the execution of the Act."

The expectations of the India House were not disappointed. In the next session of Parliament the Act of 1814 was replaced by another which granted larger exemptions to the Company and disarmed its opposition.

The later Act gave power to the Post Office to establish a line of packets to India and the Cape of Good Hope, and, until a line should be established, to employ as packets any ships it pleased, including ships of war. The mails were to go once a month. By packet--in which term is included the ship which the Post Office might be pleased to designate as packet for the occasion--the postage on a single letter was fixed at 3s.

6d.; by private ship it varied according to direction, outwards 1s. 2d.

and inwards 8d.

Such were the main provisions of the Act of 1815; but there were others which introduced new principles. As a result of the action of the East India Company in the preceding year, it was now for the first time made compulsory upon private ships to carry letters when required to do so by the Post Office,[81] and the Post Office was empowered to pay for their carriage a reasonable sum. This sum was to go by way of remuneration to the owners of the vessels, and to be in addition to a gratuity of 2d. a letter which the commander was to receive as his own perquisite. A still more important provision, a provision which a.s.suredly could not have emanated from the Post Office, was one in favour of newspapers. By packet the postage on a letter to India or the Cape weighing as much as one ounce was to be 14s.; on a newspaper of no greater weight, if stamped and in a cover open at the side or end, it was to be 3d. This was the first enactment that provided for newspapers going outside the limits of the United Kingdom for less than the letter rate of postage.

[81] One of the first, if not the very first, against whom proceedings were taken under this provision of the statute was Robert Wetherall, master of the ship _Albinia_, from Gravesend to the Cape of Good Hope.

Wetherall had at the last moment refused to take the mails on board, consisting of 173 letters. On the advice of the law officers the Post Office contemplated proceeding against him by indictment; but the Government decided to proceed by information, with a view apparently to give to the case greater importance and notoriety.

What was virtually a most interesting experiment was now about to be tried. To India and the Cape the Post Office had no packets of its own; and before private ships could be employed as packets, the consent of the owners had to be obtained and the amount of payment to be agreed upon. Practically, the Post Office was at the mercy of others. Mails had to be sent once every month; ships of war could not always be employed; and should the shipping interest combine, the postmasters-general would have to pay pretty much what owners chose to demand. To the credit of that interest nothing in the shape of combination took place. During the first sixteen months the mails were despatched five times by His Majesty's ships, four times by ships of the East India Company, and seven times by ships belonging to private owners. His Majesty's ships carried the mails, of course, without charge. The East India Company, with admirable generosity, placed their ships at the disposal of the Post Office and refused to receive any payment. And the ships belonging to private owners were engaged, the first of them for 500 and the other six for sums ranging from 50 to 150. Altogether, the sum expended during more than a year and a quarter in transporting the mails to India and the Cape of Good Hope did not exceed 1250; and the postage during the same period amounted to 11,658. In the following year, the year 1817, even better terms were obtained, the owners of private ships engaged as packets receiving in no case more than 125, and in one case as little as 25.

The East India Company's generosity was not reciprocated by the Post Office. His Majesty's ship _Iphigenia_, which was lying at Portsmouth, had been appointed to carry out the mails, and the India House had sent down its despatches to be put on board. In strictness these despatches should have been sent through the Post Office, inasmuch as the _Iphigenia_ had been appointed a packet for the occasion; but as the India House paid no postage on its correspondence, whether sent by packet or by ships of its own, it was a mere technical irregularity.

Freeling maintained, however, that there was an important distinction which ought to be observed. It was true that no question of postage was involved. It was also true that the India House would have been at liberty to put its despatches on board the _Iphigenia_ had she been sailing for India without being appointed a packet boat; but as she had been so appointed, the intervention of the Post Office was necessary, and without that intervention the commander ought not to have received them. Accordingly, Freeling urged upon the Government, though happily without success, that orders should be sent to Portsmouth to have the despatches removed from the ship to the local Post Office, to be there kept until instructions should be received from Lombard Street that they might be again taken on board.

On the close of hostilities in 1815 domestic matters began once more to occupy a place in men's thoughts; and it was next to impossible that the Post Office should escape attention. Its heavy and capricious charges, its high-handed proceedings, its disregard of the public requirements, its prosecutions, its constant indictment of roads which it largely used and yet contributed nothing to maintain, and, above all, the fact that its administration was virtually in the hands of one man, and that man not the nominal head, who could be reached by const.i.tutional means--signs were not wanting that these and other matters had created an amount of dissatisfaction which must sooner or later find expression. Yet Freeling either could not or would not see. Were not his immediate superiors, the postmasters-general, satisfied with his management, so satisfied indeed that they seldom, if ever, found it necessary to pay a visit to Lombard Street? And had not the contributions which, under his guidance, the Post Office kept pouring into the Exchequer raised him high in the Chancellor's favour? If so, what more could a loyal and industrious public servant desire?

That Freeling was elated with what he considered his unbounded success is clear from a letter which about this time was written to the Treasury, enclosing a return of the Post Office revenue, and shewing how it had responded to the successive increases of rate which had been imposed during his tenure of the office of secretary. This letter, drafted by himself, as all the official letters were, though signed by the postmasters-general, concluded thus: "We flatter ourselves that we shall not be considered as exceeding the limits of our duty in drawing your Lordships' attention to a circ.u.mstance which has made a strong impression on ourselves in the course of our inquiry, namely, that the office of secretary during the whole of this flourishing period has been executed by the same faithful and meritorious servant of the Crown." The return, with a copy of this letter appended, was afterwards presented to Parliament.

There is no more tolerant a.s.sembly in the world than the House of Commons; and yet even the House of Commons is intolerant of egotism. It may have been, and probably was, a mere coincidence, but the fact remains that from the date of the presentation of this return Freeling's influence began to wane.

CHAPTER XV

IRELAND

1801-1828

At the Union with Ireland the Irish Post Office was not merged into the Post Office of England as the Scotch Post Office was merged at the Union with Scotland. The existence of two separate establishments, presided over by different heads, who had not always the same objects in view, and were influenced by different considerations, was not unattended with inconvenience.

Between the Post Offices of the two parts of the kingdom, moreover, there were differences not only of practice but of law, the statutes pa.s.sed during the seventeen years that the Post Offices were separate not having been repealed at the time of the Union. Thus, the law which regulated franking was stricter in Ireland than in England, although, it must be confessed, the practice was looser. The law prohibiting the illicit conveyance of letters was also stricter. In England the Post Office was not empowered to search for letters; in Ireland the Post Office might search both vehicles and houses from sunrise to sunset. In England the mail-coaches were exempt from toll; in Ireland no such exemption was allowed. In Ireland, again, the Post Office was legally bound not, as in England, to deliver letters but only to carry them; and except in Dublin there was not a single letter-carrier in the kingdom.

Even the const.i.tution of the two Post Offices, though apparently similar, was really different. In Ireland, as in England, there were two heads commonly called joint postmasters-general; but whereas in England the a.s.sent of both was necessary to make a decision operative, in Ireland the a.s.sent of one was sufficient. This, while probably designed to facilitate the despatch of public business, was, as will be seen later on, attended with a curious result, a result which the framers of the statute can have little contemplated.

Of such differences of practice as were not rendered necessary by any difference of law it may be sufficient to mention a few. In England the mail-coach contractors supplied horses only; in Ireland they supplied coaches as well. In England the contract was for short periods and for short distances, seldom for more than one or two stages; in Ireland, where there was little or no compet.i.tion, the contract was for the whole of the road over which the coach travelled, and for as much as twenty and even thirty years. Meanwhile no alteration was possible except with the contractors' a.s.sent. In England the horse-posts were provided upon the most advantageous terms of which each particular case would admit; in Ireland the obligation to provide them was imposed upon the local postmasters, who received for the service, cost what it might, one uniform rate of 5d. a mile. In London there was no despatch on Sundays; in Dublin the mails were despatched on Sundays as on other days. In Dublin, again, the men who collected letters by the sound of bell, bellmen as they were now called, received not as in London 1d. a letter but 1d. a house, a difference of which the inhabitants were wont to shew their appreciation by sending to a single house for delivery to the letter-carrier the letters of an entire street.

In Dublin there was one inst.i.tution to which there was no counterpart in London. This was the British Mail Office, an office set apart for the management of the mails pa.s.sing between England and Ireland. Other mails were dealt with in the Inland Office; but those to and from England were considered of such paramount importance as to deserve exceptional treatment. At the present day the term "office" as applied to the public service conveys the notion possibly of a palace and certainly of a building or part of a building consisting of several rooms. The British Mail Office, though destined to play a not unimportant part in the history of the Irish Post Office at the beginning of the present century, consisted of one room only, and this room was exactly six feet square.

The establishment of this office was one of many measures which owed their origin to Lord Clancarty, who was joint postmaster-general with Lord O'Neill from 1807 to 1809. Clancarty enjoyed an honourable distinction. Other postmasters-general were habitual absentees, their visits to the Post Office, if visits they made, being confined to the rare occasions on which they pa.s.sed through Dublin on their way to London and back. Clancarty, on the contrary, devoted to his official duties all the powers of a keen intellect and a singularly energetic nature. Shortly after his appointment he proceeded to London, and having made himself master of the system pursued in the Inland Office in Lombard Street, returned to Dublin, resolved that, as far as circ.u.mstances would permit, a similar system should be established there.

A formidable difficulty, however, presented itself in the different hours of attendance in the London and Dublin offices. In London the attendance was daily, on every night and every morning; in Dublin it was only on alternate days, on every other night and every other morning.

How to get rid of this difference was the question which Clancarty now set himself to solve. There was at this time in the Inland Office a clerk of the name of Donlevy, whose parts pointed him out as qualified to take the lead among his fellows. Clancarty sent for this young man, and told him that under the plan which was about to be introduced he would have to attend daily. Donlevy objected that a plan which would involve such attendance was an unreasonable, an oppressive plan, and that no man's const.i.tution, strong as he might be, would stand it.

"But," said Clancarty, "I will make you vice-president." "My Lord,"

replied Donlevy, "I am very much obliged to you; but under the conditions proposed I would not accept even the office of president."

"Very well," rejoined Clancarty, laying his watch on the table, "I will give you three hours to consider of it." Long before the three hours had expired, Donlevy, who knew the character of the man with whom he had to do, and what would be the penalty of refusal, had accepted the vice-presidentship, and opposition to the introduction of daily attendance was at an end.[82]

[82] Clancarty was afterwards appointed joint postmaster-general of England. This appointment he held from 30th September 1814 to 6th April 1816, but he never took it up. Between the dates mentioned he was employed on missions abroad.

But Clancarty was an exception to the general rule. Lord Rosse, who succeeded him and remained postmaster-general in conjunction with O'Neill for more than twenty years, was, like his colleague, an habitual absentee; and the consequence was to place large power in the hands of the chief permanent officer on the spot. This was Edward Smith Lees, who had been appointed joint secretary with his father in 1801, and who on his father's death some years afterwards became sole secretary. The power which Lees must in any case have possessed as chief resident officer was enormously increased by the fact to which we have already referred, that the signature of either of the two postmasters-general was sufficient. Of this fact Lees took advantage to an extent which may seem incredible. If the particular postmaster-general to whom the case was referred agreed to the course recommended, no reference to the other appears to have been considered necessary; but if he did not agree, a reference to the other took place without the fact of disagreement being made known, or even an intimation that his colleague had been consulted.

By thus playing off one postmaster-general against the other, Lees generally contrived to secure approval of his own recommendations; but when, as occasionally happened, such approval could not be obtained from either, he claimed and exercised the right, as chief officer on the spot, to take his own course.

Thus Lees, like Freeling, was an autocrat within his own domain; but the means by which the two men attained this result were essentially different. Freeling kept the postmasters-general informed of every incident, however trivial. Lees gave no information which could with decency be withheld. Freeling supported his views by a perfect wealth of explanation. Lees explained no more than enough to carry his point.

Freeling's candour, like his loyalty, knew no bounds. It is to his candour, indeed, that we owe our materials for criticising his own proceedings. Lees's candour and loyalty, on the contrary, so far as these can be said to have had any existence, were held in rigid subjection to considerations of expediency and personal advantage.

The circ.u.mstances attending the appointment of Lees's brother, a searcher in the Customs at Wexford, to a position in the secretary's office only inferior in point of rank and emolument to his own, well exemplify the mode in which the business of the Irish Post Office was conducted during the first two or three decades of the present century.

The minute appointing him was signed, not by O'Neill and Rosse, nor by either of them, but by one of Lees's own subordinates, and purported to embody a decision come to at a Board at which the two postmasters-general were present. "At the Board"--so ran the minute--"present the Earls."

The whole thing was a fiction from beginning to end. The Earls had not been present, and there had been no Board. Indeed, as Lees was afterwards forced to admit before a Committee of the House of Commons, during a period of twenty years that O'Neill and Rosse had been joint postmasters-general and he their secretary, he had seen them only once together in the same room, and that was in the drawing-room at Parsonstown.

The example set in high quarters was not without its effect below. Every one seems to have been left to do pretty much as he liked. The force was maintained at a level very far in excess of the actual requirements, and it was no uncommon thing for one-half of the entire number to absent themselves without notice in a single morning. Some of the clerks never attended at all, while others gave to their Post Office duties only such fragments of their time as they could s.n.a.t.c.h from other and more lucrative employments. Thus, one was a clerk in a private bank, another a clerk in a merchant's office, a third was a surgeon, several held appointments under the Customs or the Imprest Office, and many were practising attorneys. To most of these the object of holding an appointment in the Post Office appears to have been not so much the salary attaching to it as the privilege which they enjoyed, or rather which they a.s.sumed to themselves, of sending and receiving their letters free. The attorneys, indeed, were credited with a still less respectable motive. All, as soon as a mail arrived, helped themselves to their own letters and the letters of the firms in which they were interested. The president of the Inland Office held a valuable appointment in the Bank of Ireland, and was not in a position to check on the part of his subordinates a license which he allowed to himself. The receiver-general, the highest financial officer on the establishment, was a private banker and money-lender, and, beyond signing the balance-sheet at stated periods, the only Post Office function he performed was to frank his own correspondence.

That in Ireland the Post Office arrangements were made subservient to private interests does not admit of a doubt. A suspicion will indeed now and again cross the mind that even in England the readiness to raise the rates of postage, and the hostility shewn to newspapers except when supplied by the clerks of the roads, were not unconnected with personal considerations; but what in the case of England is at best only a matter of suspicion becomes in the case of Ireland an absolute certainty. In Ireland, as in England, the clerks of the roads had from the first establishment of the Post Office enjoyed the privilege of franking newspapers; but soon after the British Mail Office had been established by Clancarty, two other clerks, styling themselves express clerks, undertook to supply newspapers express. Their plan was very simple. In London the newspapers were made up in a parcel addressed to the express clerks; and these clerks had in readiness messengers of their own, who proceeded to deliver the newspapers as soon as they arrived in Dublin and without waiting, as others had to do, for the sorting of the mail.

This alone would have given to the express clerks a considerable advantage over the ordinary news-vendor. But, more than this, the British mail was irregular in its arrival, and the latest hour in the evening at which a delivery by letter-carrier took place in Dublin was seven o'clock. The express clerks delivered the English newspapers by their own messengers as late as eleven o'clock.

In the case of the country the advantage which the express clerks enjoyed was still greater. The mails for the interior of Ireland left the Inland Office in Dublin at seven o'clock in the evening; but under a rule, on the observance of which the authorities rigidly insisted, no mails from the British Mail Office were to be received in the Inland Office for despatch the same evening unless they were brought there ready sorted full twenty minutes before that hour. Practically, therefore, as the sorting occupied about twenty-five minutes, mails from England arriving later than a quarter past six were detained until the following evening. No such detention, however, was sustained by the express newspapers, which, addressed as they were to the express clerks, could be forwarded up to the last moment. It may readily be supposed that, with such advantages in their favour, the express clerks and the clerks of the roads, for the two bodies had amalgamated and formed one common purse, found many customers. That they realised and fully appreciated their position will be seen from the following advertis.e.m.e.nt which was issued no longer ago than April 1822:--

BRITISH NEWSPAPER OFFICE, GENERAL POST OFFICE.

The clerks of roads and clerks of express newspapers having, under the authority of the postmasters-general, reformed their establishment in this department for the transmission of British and foreign newspapers, lottery, commercial, army and navy lists, periodical and other publications, the n.o.bility and gentry of Dublin are respectfully informed that they can be supplied with those articles either by an express delivery (which is made by special messengers immediately on the arrival of the packets) or by the regular course of post.

Country correspondents will have a peculiar advantage, as upon all occasions when a packet arrives before the despatch of the inland mails but too late for general transmission, their newspapers will be forwarded at the last possible moment.