His plan encountered that honest opposition which improvement of all kinds is obliged to overcome. The record is most instructive. The Postmaster-General, Lord Lichfield, said in the House of Lords: “Of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard of, it is the most extravagant.” On another occasion the same high official assured the House, that, if the anticipated increase of letters should be realized, “the mails will have to carry twelve times as much in weight; and therefore the charge for transmission, instead of £100,000, as now, must be twelve times that amount. The walls of the Post-Office would burst; the whole area in which the building stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and the letters.”[50] In the same spirit with his chief, Colonel Maberly, the experienced Secretary of the Post-Office, in his testimony before the Committee, did not hesitate to say: “It appears to me a most preposterous plan, utterly unsupported by facts, and resting entirely on assumption.” And he proceeded to predict a loss of revenue from its adoption, saying, that, if postage were reduced to one penny, the revenue “would not recover itself for forty or fifty years.”[51] The London “Quarterly Review,” with its habitual obstructiveness, set itself against the new plan and its promised result, saying: “Common sense is astounded at such a result and refuses to believe it, though it cannot at first sight discover where the fallacies lie; but a little examination will show, that, as usual, common sense is right, even against the assumed accuracy of arithmetic.”[52] I give these as illustrative examples of the opposition encountered. Against all these stood Rowland Hill, insisting that the Post-Office, although now “rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements,” in contemplation of the proposed reform “assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization, capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of national education.”[53] The proposed reform was vindicated as practical and valuable, first by witnesses before the Parliamentary Committee, and then in Parliamentary debate. The Committee examined no less than eighty-nine witnesses. These were from every rank and nearly every trade and profession,--peers of the realm, members of the House of Commons, authors, publishers, merchants, bankers, mechanics, common carriers, clergymen, solicitors, Post-Office officials, and others. Among the witnesses were Richard Cobden, Charles Knight, Rowland Hill, Dionysius Lardner, and Lord Ashburton.[54] The testimony embraced eleven thousand six hundred and fifty-four questions and answers, and filled three large folio volumes bound in two, making altogether nearly sixteen hundred pages. The Index alone makes one hundred and fifty-three pages.