Such instances as these occurring in business and in life led Rowland Hill to assert that “the increase in consumption is inversely as the squares of the prices”; and this rule justified the expectation, that, with the proposed reduction of letter postage from the average of sixpence to a penny, the number of letters would increase thirty-six fold.[85] If the number did not increase in this remarkable ratio, yet it was such as to disappoint the enemies of reform. It appears that the estimated number of chargeable letters delivered in the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1839, the year immediately preceding the first general reduction of postage, was 75,907,572, and in 1840, the first year of penny postage, 168,768,344, showing an increase in one year of more than 122 per cent. Since then this large number has dilated year by year, until in 1867 it amounted to 774,831,000.[86]
Postal facilities have from the beginning promoted correspondence, and this was recognized even before the appearance of Rowland Hill. An old account of the English Post-Office, after describing certain improvements, exults “that there is no considerable market-town but hath an easy and certain conveyance for the letters thereof to and from the Grand Office in the City of London, in the due course of the mails every post”; and then adds, that, “though the number of letters missive in England were not at all considerable in our ancestors’ days, yet it is now prodigiously great, since the meanest people have generally learnt to write.”[87] This is the language of another age; but it attests the stimulation which letters receive from opportunity, and illustrates the value of cheap postage.
The experience of England is reproduced in the United States, so far as we have ventured upon postage reform. Every reduction of rate has been followed by a corresponding increase in the number of letters. There was the law of 1845, by which postage was reduced to two principal rates of five and ten cents. At this proposition, which erred only in its feebleness, there was the gloomiest foreboding of utter loss to the Post-Office. The raven did not croak more hoarsely at the entrance of Duncan under the battlements of Macbeth. Mr. McDuffie, the excitable Senator from South Carolina, always sensitive for Slavery, after expressing regret that bodily infirmity disabled him from declaring the strength of his convictions in regard to the evils which would flow from this measure, protested against its adoption as “more radical and revolutionary than anything ever done in Congress.” The Senator denounced it as most unjust, and predicted that in ten years the Post-Office would cost the Treasury $10,000,000.[88] The newspaper press, though not so fervid, was as skeptical as the South Carolina Senator; and the Postmaster-General showed the very disposition which had given to his brother officials in England the designation of “unwilling horses.” In his first Report after the passage of the law, he announced a prospective deficiency for the current year exceeding $1,250,000, and, unless there should be some amendment of the law, another deficiency the next year of little short of $1,000,000.[89] Now mark the result of even this too slight reduction. The actual deficiency for 1845-6 was only $597,097,[90] and for 1846-7 it was but $33,677,[91] while in 1848-9 there was a surplus revenue of $226,127.[92] The letters in 1845 were estimated at 39,958,978; and in 1849 at 60,159,862,[93] showing an increase in four years of more than fifty per cent.