Produced by Simon Gardner, Adrian Mastronardi, The Philatelic Digital Library Project at http://www.tpdlp.net and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Notes This is a Plain Text version. It uses the Latin-1 character set. The following are used to represent special characters and marks: [~d] [~r] indicates a tilde above d, r [p=] indicates a line below p [=o] [=co] [=xon] indicate an overline extending 1, 2 & 3 characters [^p] indicates an inverted breve above p [oe] indicates an oe ligature Italic typeface in the original is indicated with _underscores_. Bold typeface in the original is indicated by UPPER CASE. Small capital typeface in the original is indicated by UPPER CASE. There are a large number of footnotes which have been numbered sequentially and grouped together at end of the book. There are numerous quotations from documents in German, French and archaic English which use many abbreviations, variant spellings and inconsistent spellings. These are retained, unless an obvious typo correction is listed at the end of this document. * * * * * STUDIES IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE. EDITED BY THE HON. W. PEMBER REEVES, PH.D., _Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science._ No. 50 in the Series of Monographs by writers connected with the London School of Economics and Political Science. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RATES OF POSTAGE * * * * * THE DEVELOPMENT OF RATES OF POSTAGE AN HISTORICAL AND ANALYTICAL STUDY BY A. D. SMITH, B.Sc. (ECON.) OF THE SECRETARY'S OFFICE, GENERAL POST OFFICE, LONDON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT HON. HERBERT SAMUEL, M.P. POSTMASTER-GENERAL 1910-14 AND 1915-16 LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1 [_Thesis approved for the Degree of Doctor of Science_ (Economics) _in the University of London_] _First published in 1917_ (_All rights reserved_) PREFACE This study, which was prepared primarily as a Research Studentship Report for the University of London, is intended to be a contribution to the history of rates of postage, and an attempt to ascertain the principles, economic or otherwise, on which they are and have been based.