The first act of importance in which Freeling was concerned after his appointment as secretary was the establishment of the ship letter office, an office which owed its origin to the suggestion of Frederick Bourne, a clerk in the foreign department. Hitherto the packet boats, where packet boats existed, had been the only means by which correspondence could be legally sent out of the kingdom; and yet in the neighbourhood of the Exchange there was hardly a place of public resort at which letters for America and the West Indies, as well as other places abroad, were not collected for despatch by private ship. There was no concealment about the matter. At Lloyds, and the Jamaica, the Maryland, the Virginia and other coffee-houses, bags were openly hung up, and all letters dropped into these bags, including those for places to which there was communication by packet, were taken on board ship, and, without the intervention of the Post Office, despatched to their destination, the captains receiving for their transport a gratuity of 2d. apiece. Illegal as the practice was, Pitt was unwilling to suppress it. The Act which made it illegal to send by private ship letters which might be sent by packet had been passed in the time of Queen Anne, and he could not reconcile it to himself to enforce a law some ninety years old which had never yet been set in motion. Bourne's idea was to sweep all ship-letters into the post, and to charge them inwards with a fixed sum of 4d. and outwards with half the packet rate of postage. If with the place to which a letter was addressed there was no communication by packet, the rate was to be fixed at what presumably it would be if such communication existed. Pitt favoured the idea and adopted it--subject, however, to one important qualification. Instead of being compulsory the Act, should an Act be passed, was to be permissive. On this point Pitt was determined. It was only in return for some service that the Post Office was entitled to make a charge. And what was the service here? To seal the bags? This he could not regard as a substantial service--a service for which a charge should be made. The ship was a private ship, her commander was not a servant of the Post Office, and the bag of letters he carried might be, and not infrequently was, for countries in which neither the Post Office nor any other branch of the British Government had an accredited agent.