The office of postmaster-general was at this time held by Lords Carteret and Tankerville. Carteret had only recently been raised to the peerage. Appointed thirteen years before as Henry Frederick Thynne in conjunction with Lord le Despencer, he had, amid the conflict of parties and the fall of successive ministries, contrived to retain his post. Tankerville, on the contrary, had come in and gone out with a change of Government. Called upon to preside over the Post Office in 1782, he had left it in 1783 and had returned in January of the following year. The part which these two peers took in connection with Palmer's plan appears to have been not injudicious. Without expressing any opinion of their own as to its feasibility or otherwise, they contented themselves with collecting and forwarding to Pitt the opinions of such of their subordinates as were presumably qualified to judge. These were the district surveyors, and their verdict was unanimously against the plan. Of the reasons for this judgment a specimen or two will suffice. By one it was objected that there could be no need for the post to be the swiftest conveyance in the kingdom; by another, that to employ firearms for the protection of the mail would encourage their use on the other side, and thus murder might be added to robbery; by a third, that not only did the posts as they stood afford all reasonable accommodation, but it was beyond the power of human ingenuity to devise a better system. Of these and other objections Pitt made short work. He summoned a conference at the Treasury, at which were present the postmasters-general, Palmer, and the objectors; and having patiently listened to all that could be urged against the plan, he desired that it should be tried on what was commonly called the Bath road, the road between Bristol and London. This conference was held on the 21st of June 1784. On Saturday the 31st of July an agreement was signed under which, in consideration of a payment of 3d. a mile, five innholders--one belonging to London, one to Thatcham, one to Marlborough, and two to Bath--undertook to provide the horses; and on Monday the 2nd of August the first mail-coach began to run. It is unfortunate that of the early performances of this coach no record remains. We only know that on the first journey it started from Bristol and not from London, and that Palmer was present to see it off; that, ordinarily, the distance was accomplished in seventeen hours, being at the rate of about seven miles an hour; and that, as a result, the expresses to Bristol, which before 1784 had been as many as 200 in the year, ceased altogether. Ten or twelve years later, indeed, the expresses for the whole of the kingdom were not one-fifth of what, before 1784, was the number for the city of Bristol alone.