The free-traders naturally hailed the postal reform with enthusiasm. It was an economic measure entirely after their own hearts, being, like their own effort for emancipation, directed against monopoly and class favouritism. Moreover, it gave an immense impetus to their crusade, since it enabled the League's literature to be disseminated with an ease and to an extent which, under the old system, would have been impossible. Thus one reform helps on another. “The men of the League are your devoted servants,” wrote Cobden in one of his cheery letters. “Colonel Thompson,[121] Bright, and I have blessed you not a few times in the course of our agitating tour.” Cobden was one of the earliest and heartiest of Rowland Hill's supporters. He thought so highly of “Post Office Reform” that he urgently advised its republication in a cheaper form, offering to defray half the cost.[122] Of the plan, when it had been some time established, he wrote that “it is a terrible engine for upsetting monopoly and corruption: witness our League operations, _the spawn of your penny postage_.” When Sir Robert Peel—more enlightened or more independent in 1846 than in 1839 and later—repealed the Corn Tax, Cobden again wrote to Rowland Hill. “The League,” he said, “will be virtually dissolved by the passing of Peel's measure. I shall feel like an emancipated negro—having fulfilled my seven years' apprenticeship to an agitation which has known no respite. I feel that _you_ have done not a little to strike the fetters from my limbs, for without the penny postage we might have had more years of agitation and anxiety.”[123] The Post Office, as we have seen, had hitherto existed chiefly for the benefit of the aristocratic and moneyed classes—those of the latter, at least, who were Members of Parliament, then rich men only—the general public having to pay dearly for the privilege of using the Department for conveyance of their correspondence. But with the advent of the new system, the Post Office straightway became the paid servant—and a far more faithful and efficient one than it is sometimes given credit for being—of the entire nation, since upon every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom were henceforth conferred equal rights to postal intercourse.