The Sun.
London, England, 1839-11-04 00:00:00

PENNY POSTAGE.

(From the Polytechnic.)
And firstly, as to Uniformity ; which,! to be ef-
fective, must be strict.. On this point, we shall begin
by quoting a few lines from the article in the Quarterly :
" We cannot give a stronger instance of the impossi-
bility of carrying the principle of uniformity into practice,
than to state the clumsy and absurd shift by which in one
very important class of cases Mr. Hill endeavoured to
overcome the ilifficulty, His principle being that all letters
should be pre paid at the rate of Id., and distributed me-
chanically without further demand or delay, it was asked
how foreign letters, arriving in England, and already
charged with heavy postages, were to be dealt with '?
This was a puzzler."
Was it ? If it puzzled Mr. Hill, or those who asked
him the question, it would not have puzzled a fifth-rate
clerk in the Post-office. " Puzzler" indeed. Why?
Is there any difficulty in preventing foreign letters ar-
riving in England charged with " heavy," or with any
postages ? We should think not ;we undertake to sad
there is not ; none whatever. The largest proportion
of foreign letters are received and sent via Calais. Let
but the English Government give to the Paris Post.
office a notice of its intention to deliver at Calais, Eng-
lish postage free, all letters going that way to the Can
tinent from England, and arrangements will instantly be
made on the other side of the water for the Frenchmen
to charge the receivers with their own postages from
that port ; and let it be further announced to the same
authorities that all letters from their side of the Chaim&
must be received pre payed at the rate of one penny
each, and without any claim for foreign postage, and we
will undertake to say that this charge (in addition to
their own) will be readily and very willingly collected by
the French Government, to be afterwards paid over to
the English Post-office. This, however, is part of t,
general plan for the collection of the postage revenue
without the intervention of any stamp whatever, the
absolute non-necessity of which we shall presently prove
under its proper head. _

What, then, becomes of the " puzzler" that staggered
Mr. Hill ? Is there any difference between forwarding
letters to Calais and to Liverpool ? Is there any dis-
tinction ? To be sure there is a " distinction," because.
letters going to Calais must be sent by water in a steam-
boat, and those to Liverpool by land in a mail-coach ;
but this is " a distinction without a difference." There
can be no greater difficulty in previously collecting e:
penny each upon a thousand letters, to be packed in a
bag and sent by a steamer to Calais, than there is in
stowing the same number away in the boot of the Edin-
burgh mail after similar pre-paynzent. The only thing
to be dune is to make the necessary preliminary arrange-
ments with the French Government, and all will go
like clock-work. We must, however, again beg our
readers to remember that this method is perfectly in-
compatible with the use of any stamp whatever as an
indication of previous payment at the Stamp-Office.
The whole business both with foreign parts and home
departments, must be transacted in ready money by the
Post-office itself ; a plan, the advantage of which, ill
place of the proposed stamps, we shall, as we have just
' announced, point out and support with convincing, nay,
overwhelming reasons. Until we come to this part of
the subject we beg our readers to go along with us in
putting the envelope stamp totally out of consideration,
and remembering that we only speak of prompt payment
in the coin of the realm.
Let us take a case by way of illustrating the state-
ment we have just made, as to the practicability of put-
ting foreign and English letters exactly on the sam
footing.
Suppose a person were to take forty-eight letters to
the London Post-office to be forwarded to Paris, he
would be charged twenty-pence each, or a total of four
pounds sterling, half of which would be retained by the
English Post-office for the carriage of the letters to Ca-
lais, and the other half would go to the French Post-
office as the charge for their subsequent transit to Paris.
But by the proposed new arrangement he would only
have to pay in London one penny each, or four shillings
for the whole, instead of two pounds, for which sum the
i English Post-office would deliver them at Calais, thence