[81] Among these he included small orders, letters of advice, remittances, policies of insurance, letters enclosing patterns, letters between country attorneys and their London agents, documents connected with magisterial and county jurisdiction, and with local trusts and commissions for the management of sewers, harbours, roads, schools, charities, etc., notices of meetings, of elections, etc., prices current, catalogues of sales, prospectuses, and other things which, at the present time, are sent by post as a matter of course. [82] Cobden was even more optimistic. In a letter to Rowland Hill he said: “I am prepared to find that the revenue from the penny postage _exceeds_, the first year, any former income of the Post Office.” [83] It was in 1838 that the mails began to go by rail. [84] This was not my father's first pamphlet. In 1832 he published “Home Colonies: Sketch of a Plan for the Gradual Extinction of Pauperism and for the Diminution of Crime.” The pamphlet advocated the settlement of able-bodied paupers on waste lands—a proposal frequently revived by different writers—by the cultivation of which the men would be made self-supporting, and the State be saved their charge. The successful working of similar experiments in Belgium and Holland was instanced as proof that the theory was not mere Utopianism. [85] No. 128, p. 531. The author of the diatribe was John Wilson Croker, whose name is preserved from oblivion by Macaulay's fierce criticism in one of his famous “Essays,” that on Croker's edition of Boswell's “Life of Johnson”—criticism which in severity rivals that on the poet Montgomery in the same series. Many years later Gladstone said to Dr Hill: “You have succeeded in doing what Macaulay attempted to do, and failed—you have suppressed Croker.”—(Mrs Lucy Crump's “Letters of George Birkbeck Hill.”)