Under the old system the postman would often be detained, sometimes as much as five minutes, at each house at which he called while he handed in his letters, and received the money due upon them. In business quarters this sort of thing had long been found intolerable, and therefore, by private arrangement with the merchants, the postman, on the first, and by far the heaviest, delivery of the day, did not wait for his money. But after the second delivery he had to call at every house where he had left letters earlier in the day and collect the postage: a process which often made the second delivery lengthy and wearisome. A test case showed that while it took a man an hour and a half to deliver 67 letters for which he waited to receive payment, half an hour sufficed for the delivery of 570 letters for which he did not wait to be paid.[38] Another evil of the old system was the temptation to fraud which it put in the way of the letter-carriers. When a weak or unscrupulous man found a supply of loose cash in his pocket at the end of his delivery, his fingers would itch—and not always in vain—to keep it there. Again, an honest man, on his way back to the office with the proceeds of his round upon him, was not safe from attack if his road was lonely or the streets ill-lighted or deserted. The old foot and horse posts were often robbed. Murders even, Mr Joyce reminds us, were not infrequent, and executions failed to check them. The system of account-keeping was “an exceedingly tedious, inconvenient, and, consequently, expensive process.”[39] The money which the recipient of a letter paid to the postman passed to the local postmaster, who sent it on to the head office. It went through many hands, and peculation was rife. “The deputy postmasters could not be held to effectual responsibility as regards the amounts due from them to the General Office; and as many instances of deficit came at times to light, sometimes following each other week after week in the same office, there can be no doubt that the total annual loss must have reached a serious amount.”[40] On the arrival of the mails at the General Post Office, the clerks were required to see that the charge entered upon every letter had been correctly made, and that each deputy postmaster had debited himself with the correct amount of postage; to stamp the letters—that is, to impress on them the date when they were posted; to assort them for delivery, in which work the letter-carriers assisted; to ascertain the amount of postage to be collected by each letter-carrier, and to charge him therewith. In addition to all this, another detail must not be forgotten—that in the London Office alone there were daily many thousands of letters which had to undergo the “candling” process. For the outgoing mails the duties were somewhat similar, and quite as complicated, and some seven hundred accounts had to be made out against as many deputy postmasters.