By the early summer of 1837 the agitation in favour of the postal reform was in full movement, and in the midst of it the old king, William IV., died. His youthful successor was speedily deluged with petitions in favour of penny postage. One of the first acts of her first Parliament was to appoint the Select Committee for which Mr Wallace had asked—“To enquire into the present rates and mode of charging postage, with a view to such a reduction thereof as may be made without injury to the revenue; and for this purpose to examine especially into the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage in a pamphlet published by Mr Rowland Hill.” Of this Committee, which did so much to help forward the postal reform, the doughty Member for Greenock was, of course, chosen as Chairman. The Committee sat for sixty-three days; and in addition to the postal officials and those of the Board of Stamps and Taxes (Inland Revenue), examined Rowland Hill and over eighty other witnesses of various occupations and from different parts of the country. The story of their arduous labours is told at great length in Dr Birkbeck Hill's edition of my father's Autobiography. There is therefore no need to elaborate it here. The evidence told heavily against the existing postal system—whose anomalies, absurdities, and gross injustice have been described in the first chapter of this work—and, with corresponding force, demonstrated the necessity for its reform.[89] It might have been supposed that the Committee's careful and elaborate examination of Rowland Hill's plan, supported as it was by an unanswerable array of facts, would have sufficed to ensure its adoption. “He had yet to learn the vast amount of _vis inertia_ existing in some Government Departments. The minds of those who sit in high places are sometimes wonderfully and fearfully made, and 'outsiders,' as he was destined to find, must be prepared to knock long and loudly at the outer door before they can obtain much attention.”[90] That the Post Office authorities would oppose the plan was a foregone conclusion. They fought against it in the strenuous fashion known metaphorically as “tooth and nail.” The Postmaster-General of the day—he who said that “of all the wild and visionary schemes which he had ever heard or read of it was the most extraordinary”[91]—gave it as his opinion that if twelve times the number of letters were carried, the expenses of conveyance would become twelve times heavier—a strange argument for an educated man to use. He also declared that with increase of correspondence the walls of the Post Office would burst—a premonition which, not unnaturally, provoked Rowland Hill into asking whether the size of the building should be regulated by the amount of correspondence, or the amount of correspondence by the size of the building.