We come now to deal with the Report, dated the 29th February, 1856, by Mr. Edward Page, an excellent officer within the limits of his duties as Inspector-General of Mails, as well as a courteous and agreeable gentleman. He is consequently much esteemed and respected.
But before going farther, let us premise that the late Mr. Robert Stephenson, in the course of the inaugural address which, as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he delivered on the 8th of January, 1856, made the following observations upon the connection between the Post Office and the railways:—
“The facilities afforded by railways to the Post Office are, no doubt, of the highest public consequence. The speed which is attained in the transmission would appear, at first, to be the greatest item in the catalogue of those facilities; but it may be doubted if it is the most important. What is really of the greatest value to the Post Office, is the facility afforded for conveying bulk. It is not too much to say that without railway facilities, the excellent plans of Mr. Rowland Hill, for the reduction of the rates of postage, could not have been carried out to their full extent. The first essential to the success of those plans would have been wanting; for there would have been no sufficient means of conveying the greatly-increased mass of correspondence necessary to be carried in order to render the reduced rates of postage profitable. The old mail coaches were never planned for bulk, which would, indeed, have been fatal to that regularity and speed, upon which the Post Office could alone rely as the means of securing to the Government the monopoly of the letter carriage of the nation. The aggregate weight of the evening mails despatched from London in 1838, in twenty-eight mail coaches, amounted, as was shown by the Report of the Select Committee on Postage, to only 4 tons 6 cwt. or an average of about 3¼ cwt. per coach. But now on a Friday night, when so many thousands of weekly papers are sent into the country, the Post Office requires, on the London and North-Western Railway, not only the use of the travelling post-office which is provided for its convenience, but it occupies also six or eight additional vans. It is obvious, therefore, that if the existing system of the Post Office had been in operation, with the present results, in the days of mail-coach communication, not one mail alone, but fourteen or fifteen mails, such as were used in those days, would have been needed to carry on, with regularity, the Post Office traffic between (say) London and Birmingham. Nearly every coach that ran in 1830, between Birmingham and London, would now have been needed for Post Office purposes, if the London and North-Western Railway had not been brought into existence. The expenses would, consequently have been so large, that a universal penny postage would have entailed a certain loss. For the great blessing, therefore, derived from cheap postal communication, the nation is, in a great degree, indebted to the facilities offered by railways. It must be borne in mind here, that the boon conferred upon the public is not limited to written correspondence. Viewed in reference to the postal facilities they afford, the railways are the great public instructors and educators of the day. Contrast the size of the _Times_, in 1830, and in 1856. Do you suppose that the huge mass of paper, which you are permitted to forward by to-night’s post, would have been conveyed upon the same terms, if the means of conveyance had remained limited to the mails and its four horses? Look at the immense mass of parliamentary reports and documents, now distributed, every session, amongst all the constituencies of the Empire, at almost a nominal charge. To what do the public owe the valuable information embodied in those documents, but to railways? except as parcels, by waggons or by canal boats, they never could have been conveyed prior to the existence of the railway system; and if they never could have been distributed, we may rely upon it they never would have been printed. The reasoning which applies to the _Times_ and to State Papers, applies to newspapers generally, and to the distribution of the prices current of merchants, and of magazines, monthly publications, and bulky parcels of every description. Without railway facilities they would probably never have been circulated at all. Certainly they never could have been circulated to the extent necessary to make them profitable. Hence, the railway, as before observed, is the greatest engine for the diffusion of knowledge.”