"If the resolution be affirmed, and the Bill has to be proposed, it will hereafter require very great care and complicated arrangements to carry the plan into practical effect. It may involve considerable expense and considerable responsibility on the part of the Government; it may disturb existing trades, such as the paper trade." ... "The new postage will be distinctly and simply a penny postage by weight." ... "I also require for the Treasury a power of taking the postage by anticipation, and a power of allowing such postage to be taken by means of stamped covers, and I also require the authority of rating the postage according to weight."[1] In this dilemma, as to _how_ to carry out the scheme in practice, Mr. Wallace favourably suggested the adhesive stamp, the adoption of which plan, he had no hesitation in saying from the evidence adduced, would secure the revenue from loss by forgery. Mr. Warburton, also a member of the 1837-38 Committee, "viewing with considerable alarm the doubt which had been expressed of adopting Mr. Hill's plan of prepayment and collection by stamped covers," recommended that plans should be applied for from the public. Again, in the House of Lords on the 5th of August, Lord Melbourne, in introducing the Bill, is as much embarrassed as was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Commons. The opponents of the Bill use, as one of their strongest arguments, the impossibility of carrying out the scheme in practice. The Earl of Ripon says:--"Why were their lordships thus called upon at this period of the session to pass a Bill, when no mortal being at that moment had the remotest conception of how it was to be carried into execution?" Here Lord Ashburton, like Mr. Wallace in the Commons, favourably suggested the adhesive stamp, "which would answer every purpose, and remove the objection of the stationers and paper makers to the measure." Let it, then, be clearly noted that, up to the period of the Bill in July and August, 1839, not a word is said in any way connecting Mr. Hill's name with other than the impressed stamp on the sheet of letter paper, or, more especially, on the stamped covers. That, _and that alone_, is taken on the one part as _his_ plan by all the speakers, official or otherwise--for that alone does the Chancellor of the Exchequer ask for "powers." The adhesive stamp is brought in, on the other part, as a distinct proposal, in no way entering into the proposals of Mr. Hill. (The above is given in more detail in my former pamphlet, entitled "Sir Rowland Hill and James Chalmers, the Inventor of the Adhesive Stamp," 1883). FOOTNOTES: [1] See "Hansard," Vol. 48. THE ADHESIVE STAMP.