Mr Maury, of the American Chamber of Commerce, assured the Select Committee that when regular steam communication between Liverpool and New York was established, the first steamer carried _five_ letters in the large bag provided in expectation of a heavy dispatch. Ten thousand letters were, however, placed in another bag sent to the care of the consignee of the same vessel; and Mr Maury himself contributed some 200 free letters to this second bag. Every ten days a steamer left this country for America each carrying some 4,000 smuggled letters—a fact of which the postal authorities were well aware; and almost every shipbroker hung a bag in his office for the convenience of those who sent letters otherwise than through the post. Letters so collected by one broker for different ships in which he was interested were said to be sometimes “enough to load a cab.” In 111 packages containing 822 newspapers sent in the course of five months to America, 648 letters were found concealed. The postmaster of Margate reported that in the visitors' season the increase of population there made no proportionate increase of postage, a fact which he attributed to the illegal conveyance of letters by steamers. The growing facilities for travel caused a corresponding growth of letter-smuggling. At the same time, the more general establishment of local penny posts tended to secure to the Post Office the conveyance of letters between neighbouring towns and villages;[47] and undoubtedly did much to recoup that extensively swindled Department for its loss of revenue caused by franking, evasions like those of Mr John Smith and others, and letter-smuggling. As usual, the people who practised the deception were scarcely so much to blame as those who, spite of every effort at reform, persisted in maintaining a system which created favouritism, hampered trade, severed family ties, and practically created the smuggling offence which scandalised the official conscience. Had the rates been less exorbitant, and had they fallen impartially on rich and poor, these dishonest practices might have had little or no existence. They ceased only when at last the old order changed, and, happily, gave place to new. FOOTNOTES: [18] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago.” By Pearson Hill. Cassell & Co. (1887). [19] As the passage is slightly condensed, quotation marks are not employed. The words generally—whole sentences sometimes—are, however, Miss Martineau's own. [20] Written while yet the fate of the Franklin Expedition was an unsolved mystery. [21] The two sorts of post were kept quite distinct, the business of the general post and that of the local posts being carried on in separate buildings and by different staffs. It was not till the postal reform had been established some years that Rowland Hill was able to persuade the authorities of the wisdom of that amalgamation of the two which formed an important feature of his plan. [22] “Hansard,” cxlvi. 189.