Mr Brookes, a Birmingham home missionary, reported that the correspondence of the poorer classes had probably increased a hundredfold; and that adults as well as young people took readily to prepayment, and enjoyed affixing the adhesive Queen's head outside their letters. Professor Henslow, then rector of Hitcham, Suffolk, wrote of the importance of the new system to those who cultivated science and needed to exchange ideas and documents. He also stated that before penny postage came in he had often acted as amanuensis to his poorer parishioners, but that they now aspired to play the part of scribe themselves. The servant class, hitherto generally illiterate, also began to indite letters home; and a young footman of Mr Baring's one day told my father that he was learning to write in order to send letters to his mother, who lived in a remote part of the country; and added that he had many friends who were also learning. Indeed, one poor man, settled in the metropolis, proudly boasted that he was now able to receive daily bulletins of the condition of a sick parent living many miles away. Charles Knight found that the reduced rates of postage stimulated every branch of his trade—an opinion endorsed by other publishers and book-sellers; and the honorary secretary to the Parker Society, whose business was the reprinting of the early reformers' works, wrote, two years after the abolition of the old system, to tell the author of the new one that the very existence of the Society was due to the penny post. “Dear Rowland,” wrote Charles Knight, in a letter dated 10th May 1843, “The Poor Law 'Official Circular' to which par. No. 7 chiefly refers, is one of the most striking examples of the benefit of cheap postage. It could not have existed without cheap postage. The Commissioners could not have sent it under their frank without giving it away, which would have cost them £1,000 a year. It is sold at 4d., including the postage, which we prepay; and we send out 5,000 to various Boards of Guardians and others who are subscribers, and who pay, in many cases, by post office orders. The work affords a profit to the Government instead of costing a thousand a year.” After four years of the new system Messrs Pickford said that their letters had grown in number from 30,000 to 720,000 _per annum_. And testimony of similar character was given either in evidence before the Committee on Postage of 1843, or, from time to time, was independently volunteered. The postal reform not only gave a vast impetus to trade and education, but even created new industries, among them the manufacture of letter-boxes and letter-weighing machines—which were turned out in immense quantities—to say nothing of the making of stamps and of stamped and other envelopes, etc.