8. The English Post-Office will compare favourably with that of any nation in the world. In no country are post-office privileges procured cheaper than with us. Like any other institution capable of endless growth, and which must grow and expand with the progressive influences of the times, it clearly is not perfect in every arrangement; but in answer to complaints of the hard, unyielding, and stringent rules which are said to bind the English Post-Office, it may not be out of place to institute a few comparisons, asking that some reference should be made to contemporary history. In England, coin was suffered for many years to pass in ordinary letters, to the temptation and seduction of many of the officers, and the practice grew from a thoughtless economy, in spite of all the appeals that were made to the contrary. At present coin is not allowed to pass through the post-office, except in registered letters: in France it has long been, and is now, a _penal_ offence to transmit coin in letters.[199] At the time Sir Rowland Hill was urging his penny-postage scheme on the attention of the British Legislature, another European State (Piedmont, 1837) had the most stringent and severe regulations maintained in its Post-Office. The law punished any one posting a book or a newspaper opposed to the principles of the monarchy with from two to five years' hard labour; any one who might receive of such newspapers or books through the post without having delivered it into the hands of the authorities with two years' imprisonment; a reward of one hundred crowns was offered to any one giving information. These arbitrary and iniquitous laws are equalled and even surpassed, in European codes of still later date--witness Russia and, until quite recently, Austria. 9. The opinion is frequently expressed in conversation, and we have often met with such expressions of opinion in our daily and weekly press, to the effect that the Post-Office ought to give more accommodation to the public in many ways, and so disburse some, if not all, of its enormous profits. These profits are said to be absurdly large; that fifty per cent. is ten times the interest of money lent on decent security, and five times as much as would satisfy sanguine private speculators. This subject of Post-Office profits is made, _de facto_, the principal argument against what is called the Post-Office monopoly.