In May, 1876, Mr. C. H. B. Patey, Principal Clerk in the Post Office Department, testified that the Post Office was losing $100,000 a year by transmitting 220,000,000 words for the newspaper press at an average price of 8 cents per 100 words. Mr. Patey said 180,000,000 words were being carried at the rate of 4 cents per 100 words, or for $74,180 in the aggregate; and 40,000,000 were being transmitted at the rate of 24 cents per 100 words, or, for $109,795 in the aggregate.[106] Mr. Patey submitted no calculations in support of his statement that there had been a loss of $100,000 on newspaper messages yielding $183,975. But he cited two illustrations from Hull and the Nottingham-Sheffield-Leeds-Bradford group of towns. He stated that the Post Office received $1,600 a year for messages transmitted to six newspapers in Hull, and spent $5,275 on the transmission of those messages. He added that the service supplied to nineteen towns included in the Nottingham-Sheffield-Leeds-Bradford group of towns yielded $21,760, and cost the Post Office $38,270.[107] In 1876, the Postmaster General, through Mr. S. A. Blackwood, Financial Secretary to the Post Office,[108] asked the Select Committee on the Post Office (Telegraph Department) to recommend to Parliament that the tariff on newspaper press messages be made "24 cents for 75 words or 100 words for each separate town to which each message may be sent, and that the 4 cent copy rate be limited to copies delivered by hand in the same town." That, it will be remembered, was the proposal made and withdrawn in 1868 by Mr. Scudamore. The Select Committee recommended that the amount of the loss on the newspaper press messages be clearly ascertained, and that the copy rates be raised sufficiently to cover that loss. But Parliament failed to act on the recommendation.