The office of Secretary to the Treasury was at this time held by William Lowndes, member of Parliament for the borough of Seaford. Lowndes had written a silly book on the currency, a book in which he endeavoured to prove that an Act of Parliament, by calling a sixpence a shilling, can double its purchasing power. He had seriously believed, when the postmasters-general recommended that the course of post to Warwick should be direct instead of by way of Coventry, that the recommendation was due to a bribe. When the postmasters-general were at their wits' end to put a stop to the illicit traffic in letters, he had suggested--and it was the only consolation which he had had to offer them--that in order to defray the expenses of the Civil List every letter passing through the post should be charged with an additional rate of 1d. Such was the man to whom was now entrusted the oversight of the Post Office bill. If confidence in the merits of the measure which the bill was designed to promote were any recommendation, a better selection could not have been made. Lowndes had long advocated an increase in the rates of postage. He had, there can be little doubt, brought Godolphin over to his views, and now, under Godolphin's successor, he obtained permission to carry them into effect. At the Post Office, unfortunately, there was at this time no one to sound a note of alarm. Cotton was no more. Evelyn, Cotton's successor, was new to his duties. Frankland was old and gouty. Between Frankland and Lowndes, moreover, relations we suspect were somewhat strained. At all events, the fact remains that the postmasters-general, who never tired of inculcating as the result of experience that low postage attracts correspondence and high postage repels it, received notice of the intention to raise the rates without even an attempt to avert the mischief.