In a short sketch of the postal reform written by my brother,[18] in the year of the late Queen's first jubilee—which was also the jubilee of the publication of our father's “Post Office Reform,” the pamphlet that swept away the old system—the following passage from Miss Martineau's “History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1815-1845” is quoted with excellent effect. From a novel point of view, and in somewhat startling colours, it presents us with a picture of the state of things which, under that old system, existed in our country through four-tenths (less one year) of the nineteenth century, and is therefore within the recollection of people still living. We look back now, Miss Martineau says,[19] with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading days when warrior husbands and their wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons parted, with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear even of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence, and we feel the same now about the families of polar voyagers;[20] but till the commencement of Her Majesty's reign it did not occur to many of us how like to this was the fate of the largest classes in our own country. The fact is that there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country except for those who, like Members of Parliament, had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage to be a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast multitude of the poorer classes who suffered, like the crusading families of old, and the geographical discoverers of all time. When the young people went out into the world the separation between them and those left behind was almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as effectually as if seas or deserts divided them (vol. iv. p. 11).