It sometimes happens that Ministries which are least conspicuous by the brilliancy of their career or the talents of those who compose them, nevertheless confer the most lasting benefits on the nation. The crowning achievement of the Melbourne administration originated neither with a Minister, nor with one of those permanent officials upon whom Ministers rely to make up for their own inexperience of departmental work, but with a humble school teacher. Nobody at this day connects penny postage with the name of Mr. Spring Rice, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who paved the way for it in the Budget of 1839, but it is inseparably associated with the memory of its inventor, Sir Rowland Hill. The son of a schoolmaster, Rowland had an extraordinary inborn love for arithmetic, and became mathematical master in his father's school. This natural talent, it is said, was directed to the study of Post Office statistics by an anecdote told of Coleridge, who happened to see a poor woman in the Lake district refuse to accept delivery of a letter from a postman because she could not afford to pay the postage--one shilling. Coleridge, hearing that the letter was from her brother, good-naturedly insisted on paying the fee, notwithstanding the woman's reluctance; but no sooner was the postman's back turned than she showed him that the letter consisted of nothing but a blank sheet. It had been agreed between her and her brother that he should send her such a blank sheet once a quarter so long as things went well with him, marking the cover so that she should not require to accept delivery, and that in this way she should get his mute message without need to pay postage. Hill detected the economic fallacy which opened the way to such innocent roguery, and rested not till he had devised means to remedy it. He published his design in pamphlet form in 1837, advancing the bold proposition that the smaller the fee charged for carrying letters the greater would be the multiplication of correspondence, and the larger the profit to the Department. He proposed an uniform charge upon letters of one penny a half ounce, irrespective of distance. It was the application to the public service of a commercial principle by which large fortunes have been repeatedly realised in private business, but the plan was unhesitatingly condemned by the Post Office authorities. The Postmaster-General, Lord Lichfield, spoke of it in the House of Lords as the wildest and most extravagant scheme of all the wild and extravagant ones he had ever listened to. Colonel Maberley, Secretary to the Post Office, declared the experiment was certain to fail, though he was of opinion that no obstruction should be placed in the way of it, lest the Government should afterwards be blamed for not giving it a trial. Lastly, Sydney Smith may be quoted as representing educated public opinion: "A million of revenue is given up," he said, "to the nonsensical Penny Post Scheme, to please my old, excellent, and