The Select Committee of the House of Commons of 1837-38, again, took exception to Mr. Hill's plan mainly on account of its liability to forgery--a stamp of the nature proposed would be extensively forged. After evidence on the part of the Stamp-Office authorities and paper makers had been taken, it was decided to recommend--that the paper for all stamped covers should be manufactured at the paper mills of a Mr. Dickenson, or of another, solely, under strict excise supervision. This paper of Mr. Dickenson's was of a peculiar make, having threads of cotton or silk so interwoven in the paper that a post-office clerk could readily know by the look or feel that a stamped cover was genuine. The paper makers protested and petitioned against this, objecting to one of the body having all the work. Besides, the proposal involved permanent excise supervision over the manufacture of paper. This proposal, however, extended only to covers or envelopes; how forgery was to be prevented in respect to the stamps upon the sheets of letter paper the Committee do not say. The whole position, in fact, remained in a state of chaos, only relieved by the ultimate adoption of the adhesive stamp, which plan Mr. Chalmers had laid before this Committee through Mr. Wallace, the Chairman, and likewise through Mr. Chalmers, M.P., a member of the Committee, and which plan had been publicly discussed, not without finding adherents, including Mr. Cobden, one of the witnesses in favour of the scheme.
To the solution proposed by the Committee that all stamped covers should be made of Dickenson's peculiar paper the Government again highly objected, further adding to the dilemma; and when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the 5th of July, 1839, introduced and carried a resolution sanctioning a Penny Postage Bill being brought forward, he distinctly only "asked hon. members to commit themselves to the question of a uniform rate of postage of one penny at and under a weight hereafter to be fixed." Everything else was to be left open. "If it were to go forth to the public to-morrow morning that the Government had proposed, and the House had adopted, the plan of Mr. Rowland Hill, the necessary result would be to spread a conviction abroad that, as a stamped cover was absolutely to be used in all cases, which stamped covers were to be made by one single manufacturer, alarm would be felt lest a monopoly would thereby be created, to the serious detriment of other members of a most useful and important trade. The sense of injustice excited by this would necessarily be extreme. I therefore do not call upon the House either to affirm or to negative any such proposition at the present. I ask you simply to affirm the adoption of a uniform penny postage, and the taxation of that postage by weight. Neither do I ask you to pledge yourselves to the prepayment of letters, for I am of opinion that, at all events, there should be an option of putting letters into the post without a stamp."