In 1855, the Postmaster-General, the late Lord Canning, commenced the practice of furnishing the Lords of the Treasury, and through them the public, with annual reports on the Post-Office. These reports, which have been continued up to the present time, show the progress of the Department from year to year, and present to the general reader, as well as to the statistician, a vast mass of interesting information. Compared with the reports of the Committee of Revenue Inquiry or of the Commissioners of Post-Office Inquiry, they are lucid and interesting in their nature. Though constructed on the same plan and little varied from year to year, they are much above the ordinary run of official documents. Lord Canning, in recommending the adoption of the plan, gave as one reason among many, that the Post-Office service was constantly expanding and improving, but that information respecting postal matters, especially postal changes, was not easily accessible. This information, he believed, could be given without any inconvenience, whilst many misapprehensions, and possibly complaints, might be avoided. The public might thus see what the Post-Office was about; learn their duty towards the Department, and find out--what half the people did not then and perhaps do not even yet understand--what were the benefits and privileges to which they were justly entitled at its hands. The Duke of Argyll succeeded Lord Canning in the management of the Post-Office in 1855, and his years of office are distinguished by many most important improvements and reforms. One important change consisted in the amalgamation of the two corps of London letter-carriers, effected soon after the installation of the Duke of Argyll at the Post-Office. The two classes of "General Post" and "London District" letter-carriers were perhaps best known before 1855, by the former wearing a red, and the latter a blue, uniform. The object of this amalgamation, for which Mr. Hill had been sedulously striving from the period of penny postage, was to avoid the waste of time, trouble, and expense consequent on two different men going over the same ground to distribute two classes of letters which might, without any real difficulty, be delivered together. The greatest objection in the Post-Office itself to completing the change, arose from the different _status_ of the two bodies of men, the one class being paid at a much higher rate of wages and with better prospects than the other class. This difficulty was at length surmounted, when the benefits of this minor reform became clearly apparent in earlier and more regular deliveries of letters. Inside the Post-Office the work was made much more easy and simple, and the gross inequality existing between two bodies of public servants whose duties were almost identical, was done away.[131]