The Secretary to the Post Office, Colonel Maberly, was apparently free from the dread of the possible effect of increased correspondence which exercised the minds of other post officials besides the Postmaster-General. The Secretary told the Committee he was sure that even if no charge were made people would not write more frequently than they did under the existing system; and he predicted that the public would object to prepayment. He approved of a uniform rate, but apparently in theory only, as he added that he thought it quite impracticable. He doubted whether letter-smuggling—to which practice Mr Peacock, Solicitor to the Post Office, and other officials made allusion as an evil on a very large scale—would be much affected by the proposed reduction of postage, since “it cannot be reduced to that price that smugglers will not compete with the Post Office at an immense profit.” He pronounced the scheme to be “fallacious, preposterous, utterly unsupported by facts, and resting entirely on assumption”; prophesied its certain failure, if adopted, and said the revenue would not recover for forty or fifty years.[92] Some of the officials made the rather humiliating confession that they should not know how to deal with the multitude of letters likely to follow a change of system, and a “breakdown” was so frequently predicted, that it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the wish was father to the thought. The dread expressed of this increase of correspondence is, in the light of these later days, unaccountable. “Has any one,” pertinently asked my father, “ever heard of a commercial company _afraid_ of an expected growth in its business?” It was maintained that a fivefold increase of letters would necessitate a fivefold number of mail-coaches, and Rowland Hill was accused of having omitted this “fact” in his calculations. The objection was absurd. The coaches were by no means fully laden, many having very little to carry, and the chargeable letters, as we have seen, formed only a small portion of the entire mail. Twenty-four coaches left London every evening, each bearing its share of that small portion; but had the whole of it been conveyed in one coach, its bulk would not have displaced a single passenger. Colonel (afterwards General) Colby,[93] indeed, told the Committee that his attention was first drawn to the desirability of cheapening postage while travelling all over the kingdom, when he had “observed that the mails and carriages which contained the letters formed a very stupendous machinery for the conveyance of a very small weight; that, in fact, if the correspondence had been doubled, trebled, or quadrupled, it could not have affected the expense of conveyance.”[94]