“Seldom, I believe, has any committee worked harder,” wrote my father, in after years. “Mr Wallace's exertions were unsparing, his toil incessant, and his zeal unflagging.” The _Times_ spoke but the truth when in its issue of 31st May 1839, it said that the Post Office Inquiry was “one conducted with more honesty and more industry than any ever brought before a Committee of the House of Commons.”[107] Yet how near it came to destroying the reform outright. The third and concluding Report of the proceedings of this memorable Committee was entrusted for revision to the competent hands of Mr Warburton, who made of it a model Blue Book. “On all important points,” wrote Rowland Hill, “it gave to my statements and conclusions the sanction of its powerful authority. Nevertheless, as the Committee had determined on the recommendation of a twopenny rate, the Report had to be framed in at least formal accordance with this fact; though both Mr Wallace, in whose name it went to the Committee, and Mr Warburton, its author, were strongly in favour of the penny rate. A careful perusal of the document, however, will show that, though the twopenny rate is formally recommended, the penny rate is the one really suggested for adoption. In this sense it was understood by the public; and, to my knowledge, it was wished that it should be so understood.”[108] Outside the official circle, opinion, though mainly favourable, was still a good deal divided; and the dismal prophecies which always precede the passing into law of any great reform had by no means ceased to be heard. It is therefore not altogether surprising that even so clear-sighted a man as Sydney Smith—whose wisdom is too seldom remembered by those who think of him only as a wit—should have laughed at “this nonsense of a penny post.” But when the “nonsense” had had three years of trial he wrote to its author, uninvited, a letter of generous appreciation. Miss Martineau, as an able journalist and political economist, gave valuable assistance to the postal reform. To read her statesmanlike letters to my father, even after the lapse of over half a century, is indeed a “liberal education.” In these, when writing of the old system, she employed several notable phrases, of which, perhaps, one of the finest was that describing the barrier raised by heavy postal rates between severed relatives as “the infliction which makes the listening parent deaf and the full-hearted daughter dumb.” In a letter, written shortly before penny postage became a reality, to him whom in her Autobiography she calls “the most signal social benefactor of our time,” she told how “we are all putting up our letter-boxes on our hall doors with great glee.” In the same letter she described the joy of the many poor “who can at last write to one another as if they were all M.P.s!” _As if they were all M.P.s!_ What a comment, what a, may be, unconsciously satirical reflection on the previous state of things![109]