This development is noteworthy. It has always been found in Canada that for a large part of the country the circumstances are such that a postal service adequate to the necessities of the inhabitants cannot be self-supporting, but the Legislature has never hesitated to make grants from general taxation in order to provide means of communication. In the early days the question of post office communication was intimately bound up with the question of general means of communication, and was usually treated in connection with the making or maintenance of roads. For a long period the posts in Canada were maintained not solely for the transmission of letters, but to a great extent on account of collateral advantages. They were largely military in character, and were identified with the military routes.[111] In 1816 Daniel Sutherland was appointed Deputy Postmaster-General for Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Under his administration the development of the service was pushed forward, and so far as was found consistent with the interests of revenue, new offices and routes were established. But in 1820 there were still no more than forty-nine post offices in the whole of British North America, distributed thus: in Lower Canada twenty offices, in Upper Canada nineteen, in Nova Scotia six, in New Brunswick three, and in Prince Edward Island one. The progress was from this time somewhat more rapid. By 1824 the number of offices in the Canadas alone had risen to sixty-nine, and during the next ten or fifteen years the growth, both of Post Office accommodation and of Post Office revenue, was more rapid than the growth of population. The settlers were not, however, completely satisfied. Their complaints were to some extent laid against the administration of the office--they claimed, for example, that gross overcharges of postage were being made, through incorrect computation of the distances on the post roads--but they became more and more dissatisfied that the control of the whole of the service and its officers should rest with the Postmaster-General in England. The question was, of course, to a large extent political, and one only among the several general grievances of the colonists at this period, which caused so much anxiety to the Home authorities.