The proceedings of the Committee, as I have already stated, were brought to a rather abrupt conclusion, so as to prevent, for the moment, an elaborate Report. Nevertheless the power to say enough to acquit both the Treasury and Post Office was obviously in the hands of the majority, had it felt warranted in such a course; or again, if the inquiry were judged incomplete, nothing could have been easier than to procure the reappointment of the Committee in the following session, and so to obtain abundant time for the formal acquittal of both departments, together with an equally complete condemnation of myself. Neither course, however, was taken. The Committee merely reported what it had done, regretted its inability, for want of time, to report its opinion, but gave the evidence and various correspondence, and entertained no doubt that both the Treasury and the Post Office would give my proposals the fullest consideration.[26] The reader must imagine for himself, if he can, the grounds on which the Committee had to rest when they expressed such confidence. All I need say here is, that I can point to but little in subsequent events to relieve his perplexity.

My pamphlet continued as follows:—

The preparation of the pamphlet from which I have drawn the foregoing account could not, of course, begin until the appearance of the printed report of the Committee’s proceedings, which was not until more than three months after their close. The interim allowed me a period for needful rest, and was not quite without features of interest.

On September 7th I received a letter from the Spanish Minister in London, requesting information desired by his Government, with a view to the introduction of the postage-stamp into Spain. Such information I was, of course, most happy to supply; the more so as I felt that the very use of the stamp must involve a certain amount of uniformity, and, as a consequence, tend to low rates.

Not long afterwards, the papers announced that the Russian Government also had adopted the stamp, though for a reason which the Englishman even of that time would hardly have imagined for himself, and which certainly I had not set forth among expected advantages. The motive in each case was understood to be the desire of preventing fraud in the postmasters; and it is obvious that much peculation, practicable under the system of money payments, would be prevented by the use of stamps. It is remarkable, however, that the first countries to adopt the improvement—Spain and Russia—should be two so far from taking a general lead in European civilization and liberality.

On November 22nd the Committee’s Report was issued, and without loss of time I fell to such perusal and annotation of the whole evidence as were necessary preliminaries to the writing of my pamphlet. It was finished before the end of January, and copies were immediately sent to the leading journals, to every member of the Postage Committee, to Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Goulburn, to various other influential persons, and to a large number of friends and supporters.

Amongst various letters of acknowledgement I received the following:—

CHAPTER XIII.

RAILWAY DIRECTION. (1843 TO 1846.)

In the midst of these transactions I found it necessary, as I have already said, to think of means for the maintenance of my family. My choice, however, was limited, for, as I never abandoned the hope of returning to my occupation under Government, I had to avoid any engagement which would render this impracticable or even difficult. I wished, likewise, to find some post which should, if possible, have some direct relation to that service which was uppermost in my thoughts—should, even by its nature, tend to give me increased fitness for those more immediate and more detailed duties which I hoped to be one day called on to perform.

It happened that at this time the affairs of the Brighton Railway Company were in an unsatisfactory state, so much so that it was held desirable to unseat the actual directors and appoint others in their place. In this project I was invited to take part, and being put in nomination for the new board, became, by the success of the movement, one of the directors. The new Chairman was Mr. J. M. Parsons, and to him, more than to any other individual, are to be attributed the judicious and energetic measures taken, in the early stages, for the restoration of the Company’s affairs. He afterwards informed me that he viewed my appointment with considerable alarm, expecting that I should urge, if not a penny rate, at least some sweeping reduction of fares, to the ruin of the Company’s finances. It will suffice to say that we became sincere, accordant, and earnest coadjutors, and formed a friendship which continued warm and unbroken to the day of his death, some five-and-twenty years afterwards.

The rigorous examination immediately set on foot showed the existence of practices now too well known in railway management, whereby the appearance of prosperity is maintained amidst progress towards real insolvency. Dividends had been paid when there were in fact no profits to divide, and meantime the resources of the Company were being drained and narrowed, by waste, mismanagement, and inattention to public convenience. Distrust and dissatisfaction had gone so far that the value of the shares, originally £50, had fallen to £35. The directors soon saw that for the first half-year, at least, no dividend could justly be made; but, of course, they were not without anxiety as to the result of such an announcement on the price of shares. To our gratification, it was so well received by the public that the price almost immediately began to rise; and I may add that purchasers had no reason to regret their outlay.

After having continued some time in the direction, I had the satisfaction to find myself, on the motion of the late Mr. Pascoe Grenfell, M.P., unanimously appointed Chairman of the Company, and from this time I gave my undivided attention to its affairs. Fully convinced of its great capabilities, and having great reliance in my coadjutors, and (if the truth must be told) in myself, I had invested in its shares all my own property, and a considerable sum of money borrowed from the various members of my family and other friends, some of whom also became shareholders on their own account. In so doing, I did not look upon myself as rash, but as simply embarking the largest capital that I could command in a concern of whose soundness I was well assured, in which I was a leading partner, and from which, if expectations were not realized, I should have it in my power to withdraw with, at worst, but moderate loss.

While retrenching useless expenditure and providing for public convenience, the directors also turned much attention to the important point of security to the lives and limbs of passengers. On this point, as well as on some others, I had an opportunity for inspection, of which I made the most. I had removed to Brighton; in my trips to town, made three or four times each week, I regularly took my seat in a coupé facing backwards at the extreme end of the train. By this means I could, at pleasure, take notice of proceedings and appearances along the line, and in particular mark how far the signals required after the passing of a train were duly made. The solicitor to the Company, who also resided at Brighton, soon became my frequent companion, and now and then the third place was occupied by one or other of the directors. This gave convenience for the transaction of business by the way, and enabled me to enter the board-room thoroughly prepared for rapid and decisive action.

I believe it was upon the Brighton line that systematic examination of officers previously to their admission to new duties was first established, and I took every means to make it as complete as possible.

Generally speaking, I had the hearty co-operation of my brother directors, and doubtless many of the improvements effected during my connection with the Board originated with one or other of their number; but there was one important point on which it was with difficulty that I got my own way, and I advert to this particularly, because I am convinced by a variety of circumstances that laxity thereon is a frequent cause of accident, even to the present day. This was a strict enforcement of penalties—very moderate ones sufficed—on every discovered breach of rule. Of course there was ready concurrence in this whenever the omission resulted in positive accident, but there was no less disposition to condone at other times. “Why punish the poor man?—No harm has been done,” was a frequent remonstrance; and when I pointed out that the amount of blame was nowise affected by the result, my proposition, though admitted in theory, was deemed harsh in practice; so that, while no objection was raised to the soundness of the rule, almost every case seemed to be regarded as an exception. Fortunately, I had enough of support to maintain enforcement, and to this I attribute much of the benefit which followed.

Another useful practice was to diffuse throughout the Company’s force full information as to the cause of accidents, wherever they might occur. For this purpose, we arranged with the proprietors of one of the railway journals, that whenever accounts of accidents were given in the paper we should be supplied with three or four hundred slip-copies of the narrative, and these were distributed to every station-master, engine-driver, guard, and pointsman—in short, to all on whose conduct the safety of the passengers depended.

Again, by occasionally travelling on the engine I discovered defects in the arrangements which might otherwise have been concealed till some catastrophe brought them to light. For instance, the road between London and Brighton at that time belonged to three several companies, each with a different code of signals, or rather, each, with certain exceptions, interpreting the same signals differently. Consequently, the engine-driver, in reading the signal, had to consider on what part of the road the train was then running. The danger of such a state of things was so obvious that I had no great difficulty in establishing a uniform code. I may remark here, that I know of few things more interesting or exciting than to travel on an engine running at high speed, especially on a dark night.

The success of all these precautionary measures was highly satisfactory. It must, indeed, be admitted that in some respects safety was easier of attainment then than now, lines being more simple and the traffic much less. But, on the other hand, experience was then comparatively short, and much was unknown which is now familiar; neither was the electric telegraph yet in use. Be all this as it may, the fact is that during the three years and more that I sat at the Brighton board the Company was subjected to, I believe, but one external claim for compensation. This exceptional case was as follows. It is well known that when a train reaches a terminus it is the duty of a pointsman to direct it into some portion of the station then free to receive it. On one occasion the pointsman at Brighton so blundered that the arriving train struck against a line of carriages, fortunately empty ones, then occupying the rails on to which it ran. As the train was of course preparing to stop, and had brought down its speed almost to a minimum, the collision was slight; and though the alarm was considerable, and several of the passengers were a little shaken, only one sustained any injury. This was a young woman who wore one of the large combs common at the period, and whose scalp was slightly wounded by its teeth. Of course the compensation was trifling. The pointsman, being brought before the Board, at once acknowledged his error, and declared his inability to account for the momentary misapprehension which produced it, but pleaded in excuse that though he had held his present post for several years, and had had on the average to perform the duty in question nearly a hundred times per day, this was his first mistake in its execution. This statement, which, so far as it could be tested, was found to be literally true, appeared so satisfactory to the Board, that, in their judgment, looking at his conduct as a whole, the man deserved praise rather than blame; though, in deference to public opinion, he was for a time removed to an inferior post.

Two improvements adopted by the Board, chiefly, I believe, on my recommendation, are now recognised as established institutions; and by their extension to other lines, and by increase in the scope of their operation, have obtained an importance far beyond any expectation that I could then have formed. These are excursion-trains and express-trains. Our first excursion-train ran on Sundays only. After a time the train was run on Mondays also.

The earliest express-train, intended to accommodate residents in Brighton whose occupation was in London, started from the first at its present hour, though of necessity it occupied more time in the trip; as no engine of the day was able to run fifty miles without stopping to take in water, while no means had yet been devised for supplying it to an engine in motion. The train, however, travelled at the rate of thirty-four miles per hour, including a halt at Redhill, no small achievement at that time. Every one must have remarked how soon the gratification of one desire gives birth to another—how soon we complain of imperfection in what would have been regarded but a few years earlier as unattainable perfection. I happened one day to travel in an ordinary carriage, and, not being known to its other occupants, heard some free remarks on the management of the line, to which I listened for my own edification. Somewhat to my disappointment, I found the late acceleration complained of as insufficient, one of the passengers exclaiming, “This is a slow-coach!—a very slow coach!” Imprudently I asked, “Are you aware, Sir, that the whole distance from London to Brighton is accomplished in an hour and a-half?” “Oh!” was the glib reply, “if they can do it in an hour and a-half, they can just as well do it in an hour!” [28]

By one expedient I sought to combine advantage to my present service with benefit to my former one. Perceiving that residence at Brighton, and therefore custom to the railway, would be increased by every addition to postal facilities between that town and the metropolis, I induced the directors to make an offer to the Post Office for the conveyance of a mail by every train without any additional expense to that department. The result of this offer, which was kept for some time under consideration at the Post Office, will presently appear.

In the course of 1845 the price of the £50 shares had risen, I think, to £75, or more than twice their market value at the time when the new directors were appointed—a price, however, which I knew to be in excess of their real value, and which was due in part to the general inflation at the time, for this, it may be remembered, was the year of the well-known “railway mania.” I may observe here that, pecuniarily speaking, I had been a gainer by my expulsion from the Treasury; the rise in the value of my railway property, resulting in great measure from my own efforts and those of my brother directors, having been so great as to render my previous salary comparatively insignificant; indeed, in one year, while chairman, my total gain was as high as £6,000. Why, then, did I resign so advantageous a position, especially as I could not but foresee a danger, a fear afterwards too well confirmed, that, in the absence of my own direct supervision and control, these great profits might be exchanged for yet greater losses? The answer is to be found in the political circumstances of the day. By this time Sir Robert Peel’s Government was beginning to totter, and the Liberals to have strong hopes of a speedy return to power. Believing that their return would be followed by my own recall, and feeling that my late efforts had drawn considerably on my strength both of body and mind, I resolved to obtain a long holiday—an indulgence impracticable while I retained the chairmanship. I gave notice accordingly, as appears by the following extract from the Railway Chronicle, which will, perhaps, be the more interesting as it announces the result of the offer to the Post Office already mentioned, and indicates probable consequences:—

Some months after the appearance of the paragraph quoted above, I received an application which gave me much pleasure from the South-Western Railway Company. I must premise that my intercourse with this corporation had been hitherto mainly of a hostile character, its contests with the Brighton Company having been both numerous and fierce. I was now informed, however, that this Company intended to appoint a manager at a high salary, then a rather novel measure, and I was requested to recommend a fit person for the duties. Upon my inquiring as to the precise amount of salary to be given, and the specific qualifications required, I was told that the former would be about £1,500 per annum, and for the latter, said the respondent, “Let them be as much like your own as possible.” The meaning of this could not be misunderstood, but, of course, under the circumstances, could not be acted upon. Other eligible offers were made to me, but, with the Post Office in view, I could accept none.

I had now passed nearly four years in the position of railway director, and though it was grief and bitterness to me to be so long kept aloof from my true work, yet, considering the close connection between railway companies and the Post Office, and the consequent importance of the knowledge I had been enabled to gain, I could not regard the time as ill-spent.

Before leaving the subject of railways, however, I must mention one occurrence, typical, I believe, of many others, the whole forming one of the great causes of that unfortunate depreciation in railway property of which the world is now but too well aware. At the time of my joining the company the town of Hastings enjoyed no railway communication with any other place. Two projects were started for connecting it with London—one by the Brighton Company, and the other by the South-Eastern. In the parliamentary contest that ensued, the Brighton Company dwelt much on the importance of a coast-line, so useful in defence against invasion, of which at that time there was no small apprehension. Of the military advantage of such a line, strong evidence was given, I think, by the Duke of Wellington. The South-Eastern Company, on the other hand, whose projected line was in effect of the same length, based its claim mainly on the fact that by taking the inland route it would open up a new tract of country of great agricultural importance. The Committee, naturally desirous of obtaining both advantages, suggested for the consideration of the Brighton Company whether it would not be worth while to construct its coast-line, even though the inland line should also be made. As, however, the Brighton directors distinctly rejected this proposal, on the ground that the traffic would not suffice for two lines, the Committee decided in favour of the coast-line; and the Brighton Company, regarding a decision made under circumstances so peculiar as a sufficient security against competition, put the works immediately in hand. In the next session, however, the South-Eastern Company returned to the charge with a slight modification of its route, made, apparently, to save appearances; but again, the modified project being referred to the Board of Trade, according to a rule recently laid down by the House of Commons, and being condemned by that authority, on the ground that the line was in effect the same with that lately rejected by Parliament, was abandoned by the Company. In the following session, however—as Parliament meantime had shown little disposition to treat the recommendations of the Board of Trade with respect—the project was again renewed. When the Brighton directors attempted opposition, they were coolly informed by the chairman of the parliamentary committee that, owing to a change in the Standing Orders of the House, they had no locus standi. In short, the South-Eastern Company gained its point. Railway companies have been denounced as ruining each other by competition; if so, where does a large portion of the blame lie?

CHAPTER XIV.

NATIONAL TESTIMONIAL (1844-1846).

Of one motive to retirement from more active railway duties I have not yet spoken: it was supplied by the generosity of the public, as will appear hereafter. I first return to transactions connected with the Post Office, from which attention has been withdrawn by the above narrative. Of such limited progress, however, as was made towards the adoption of my plans, I shall speak more conveniently when the period of my exclusion approaches its close.

I had the high gratification to learn that the leading feature of my plan had been introduced to some extent into the United States, and that the President had announced to Congress his desire to reduce the postage throughout the Union; a measure carried into effect in the spring of 1845, when the postage was fixed at five cents (twopence-halfpenny) for distances within three hundred miles, and ten cents between places more remote. At home, however, the Liberal party wisely judged that the time for further parliamentary action on the subject of postal reform was not yet come, though occasional motions on postal affairs showed that the question did not altogether sleep.

Meantime, an occurrence took place which brought postal affairs, on a point of much importance, repeatedly before Parliament and the country. This was the opening of letters to and from Signor Mazzini and other Italian exiles, by authority of the Secretary of State for Home Affairs, from whose name such practices were for a time termed “Grahamizing,” though, in truth, Sir James Graham was by no means their originator. The unhappy consequences, however, in this particular instance, raised so strong a feeling of indignation against the individual minister, as in great measure to withdraw public attention from the precedent pleaded in his defence. There were two debates on the subject in each House in June, 1844, and these were followed by many further discussions, ending in each House by the grant of a committee of inquiry, each of which made its Report in the following August. In that of the Lords alone there is reference, and that I think somewhat obscure, to what, as I afterwards learned, was a regular practice at the Post Office, though for it the Post Office authorities were nowise responsible. Incredible as it may appear to my readers, it is nevertheless true that so late as 1844 a system, dating from some far distant time, was in full operation, under which clerks from the Foreign Office used to attend on the arrival of mails from abroad, to open the letters addressed to certain ministers resident in England, and make from them such extracts as they deemed useful for the service of Government. Happily, the feeling manifested on this occasion led to the entire abandonment of this most questionable expedient; though it must be recorded that a motion made by Mr. Duncombe, on April 9th, 1845, to forbid the further opening of letters under any circumstances, was lost, the House apparently holding that there were circumstances which might render such an expedient just and necessary. I may remark, however, that in the ten years during which I had opportunity for direct knowledge on the subject, it was never resorted to except in a very few cases relating, so far as I can recollect, exclusively to burglars, and others of that stamp.

I cannot close this portion of my narrative without mentioning one small but curious incident. In May, 1845, I received a letter from my friend Dr. Henderson, informing me that there was a tract in the British Museum, dated as far back as 1659, and entitled “A Penny Post,” the author of which bore my own surname. On application to my friend Dr. Gray, I received, through his kindness, a manuscript copy of the same, which is still in my possession. The title is as follows:—“A Penny Post, or a Vindication of the Liberty and Birthright of every Englishman in Carrying Merchants’ and other Men’s Letters, against any Restraint of Farmers of such Employments. By John Hill, 1659.” [29]

I now come to a proceeding of no small importance to myself, whether regarded as an attestation of my services, or as an augmentation of my means. In March, 1844, the Mercantile Committee, so frequently mentioned in this narrative, issued an advertisement inviting subscriptions to a testimonial in my favour. Generally speaking, I was most properly left uninformed as to details; but in December of the same year I received a letter from Mr. Estlin, an eminent surgeon of Bristol, giving an account of proceedings in that important city anterior to any movement in London; and, in point of fact, I believe it was in Bristol, and from Mr. Estlin, that the testimonial had its origin. I may add that, so far as I am aware, the first London paper in which the measure was advocated was one in which I believe Mr. Estlin may have had some influence. It was a paper of limited circulation, called The Inquirer, and I was informed that the article in question was from the pen of the editor, the Rev. William Hincks. Neither of these gentlemen now survives; but, feeling how much I owe to both, I cannot omit this small tribute to their memory.

In the early part of 1845, after having been requested to take in advance the contributions of three of the larger towns, I received from Sir George Larpent a formal copy of the resolutions of the Mercantile Committee, together with a cheque for £10,000, the final presentation being deferred until the accounts should be entirely made up.

Of course the main proceeding made its way into the newspapers, and thus became known to the public in general, and to the Commissioners of the Income Tax in particular—the consequence being an application from the Commissioners for Brighton, demanding income-tax upon the chief amount. Finding that representations to them produced no effect, I overleaped the next stage, and went at once to Mr. Trevelyan at the Treasury, who, like the Duke of Wellington on a well known occasion, exclaimed, “This is too bad!” adding, “It will never do first to deprive you of your salary, and then to tax the public subscription made in lieu of it. Leave this to me.” I willingly agreed, and a few days later received a letter from the Income Tax Commissioners, enclosing an instruction from the chief office for the withdrawal of the demand.

It would be ungrateful to omit mention here of some indications of public satisfaction besides those of a pecuniary nature. Thus, I received the following interesting letter from Mr. Cobden:—

Probably Mr. Cobden, in this letter, referred merely to the great facility given by cheap postage for the transmission and circulation of those papers which played so material a part in the Anti-Corn Law agitation; but it seems not unlikely that other assistance may have been afforded to his great improvement by the success, so far as then ascertained, of my measure, as a bold reduction of taxation—a change much more sudden and decided than had ever before taken place in our fiscal system. I believe I am safe in assuming that this success has acted as an encouragement to the many adventurous changes in taxation which have followed one another in rapid succession even to the present time.

Among the many minor evidences to the benefit derived from cheap postage, the following little circumstance was not the least pleasing. The late Mr. Tremenheere told me that a servant-boy in his father’s house in London, learning that his mother in Somersetshire was dangerously ill, wrote home for a daily bulletin, which he duly received until the danger was over, eagerly rushing every morning to the door at the first sound of the postman’s knock. Such an occurrence would seem trivial now; it was felt then as a striking novelty.

The formal presentation of the Testimonial took place at Blackwall on June the 17th, 1846, a public dinner being given on the occasion. Of my own family there were present my father (then in his eighty-fourth year), all my brothers, my brother-in-law, and my only son. The chair was taken by Mr. Warburton. A report was read by the secretary of the Testimonial Committee, from which it appeared that the net amount of the subscription was upwards of £13,000. The committee expressed its opinion that the amount would have been larger had not individual subscriptions been limited at the outset to £10 10s. The report also, contrasting the testimony from the Treasury to the value of my services with the fact of my dismissal, urged my recall. The chairman took occasion in the speech, in which he proposed my health, to point out that among the subscribers to the Testimonial Fund was to be reckoned the First Lord of the Treasury, Sir Robert Peel.

In my reply, after expressing my thanks, and speaking of the public services of those who had assisted in the great work of postal reform, I proceeded to a short review of the principal results of penny postage up to that time. I showed that, even with the very limited adoption of my plan, considerable progress had been made towards the recovery of the revenue and that large multiplication of letters on which I had counted; the number of letters delivered within twelve miles of St Martin’s-le-Grand being already equal to that delivered under the old system throughout the whole United Kingdom. I next touched upon those yet more important benefits which could not be exhibited in a statistical form; and upon this point I was happily able to quote from a recent speech of Mr. Goulburn, made on the bringing-in of his Budget, the passage being as follows:—

Now, by applying this rule to the determination of the amount of relief afforded by the reduction of the postage rates, even taking such reduction at only fivepence per letter, it would appear that the total benefit amounted to the enormous sum of £6,000,000 per annum.[30]

Having thus dealt with the past and present, I proceeded to speak of the future; and here I turned again to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as a judge certainly free from all suspicion of undue leaning towards penny postage, for an opinion as to the results to be expected from those improvements for which I had so strenuously contended. In the same speech he anticipated “that the revenue of the Post Office, as additional facilities are given, will continue to present a large annual increase”; and further on he estimated the net postal revenue for the current year at £850,000. I was able, even then, truly to add—and I may observe in passing, that this remark has since that time been frequently repeated by others—that there was no branch of the revenue the increase of which was so steady and rapid as the revenue of the Post Office. I pointed out that, as education became more and more extended, a large increase of correspondence, and consequently of revenue, might be confidently expected; the more so because, great as the actual amount appeared when viewed in the aggregate, the average yielded by its division amongst the whole population was but one letter per month for each person; while if the time should ever come when the average postage of the country would equal that given by the domestic correspondence of my own family, including children and servants, the annual gross revenue of the Post Office would amount to more than £40,000,000—or twentyfold its actual sum.

But if the present imperfect arrangements afforded such results as those which had actually been realized, what would be the effect of adopting the whole plan? Little had been done towards this during the last three years, but the Post Office had reluctantly made at least one valuable move. It had established new deliveries in London to the extent, if not of six, as recommended by myself, yet to that of three. The effect was immediately to advance the annual rate of increase in the number of district letters by 50 per cent. This improvement had not been followed by that earlier delivery of the general post letters which I had offered to effect without any material addition to expense, but such an acceleration the Post Office had declared impossible.

In the department of economy, however, much remained to be effected, and that not by a reduction of salaries, nor by increasing the labours of the men, but by simplifying the mechanism of the Post Office. I added that, seeing how much room there was for further improvement, and yet how near the results actually obtained approached to those anticipated from the complete development of the plan, I thought we were fully justified in assuming that, but for the unfortunate interruption in the progress of the measure which took place on the retirement of the Liberal Government, there would ere this have been no exception whatever to the realization of our anticipations.

I then referred to the good effects of penny postage on the action of other countries; its adoption by the British Parliament having already led to reductions in Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain, and the United States of America.

I continued as follows:—

I concluded thus:—