The consideration of the reasons for the financial failure of the State telegraphs may begin with the discussion of the effect of the building of unremunerative extensions. In 1873 the Treasury Department forced the Post Office Department to abandon the doctrine that every place with a money order issuing post office was of right entitled to a telegraph office. The treasury in that year adopted the policy of demanding a guarantee from private individuals whenever it did not care to assume the risk of a telegraph office failing to be self-supporting.[73] The new policy, of course, applied only to places not yet provided with telegraphic service, for the withdrawal of an established service would have led "to an immense amount of public inconvenience and agitation that the Government would have been unable to resist."[74] [Sidenote: _Sir S. Northcote's Disillusionment_] In speaking of the policy of requiring guarantees in order to check the pressure brought by the House of Commons for additional telegraphic services, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Northcote, in 1875, said: "The Government cannot give the answer that private companies could, and I am sure did, give. This is a point worthy of consideration, not so much in regard to the telegraph service itself, in which we are now fairly embarked, and of which we must make the best we can, as in reference to suggestions of acquisitions of other forms of property, and the conduct of other kinds of business, in which I hope the House will never be led to embark without very carefully weighing the results of this remarkable experiment."[75] The guarantee in question, which had to be given by private individuals, covered: the annual working expenses; interest on the capital investment; sinking fund payments which should repay in seven years the capital invested; and a margin for certain contingencies.[76] In August, 1891, was abolished the provision requiring a guarantee of the repayment of the capital in seven years.[77] At the same time, the local governments were authorized to give the guarantee that continued to be required.[78] In 1897, upon the occasion of Her late Majesty's Diamond Jubilee, the Treasury authorized the Post Office to assume one-half of the burden of non-paying telegraphic services; and since May 1, 1906, the Post Office assumes two-thirds of that burden.[79] The guarantees demanded after 1873 proved an effective check upon log-rolling. For example, in 1876, Catrine, in Ayrshire, with a population of 2,000, still was without telegraph service, while Tarbolton, in Ayrshire, population 500, had acquired such service previous to 1873.[80] In the period from 1874 to 1878 the number of postal telegraph offices increased only from 3,756 to 3,761. Before leaving this subject, it is necessary to warn the reader against misleading tables published in several official documents, and purporting to show that non-paying offices rapidly became self-supporting.[81]