With the aid of the documents produced, the O'Callaghan committee managed to elicit from Stayner a fairly complete statement of the position of the post office in the Canadas in 1834-1835. Asked as to his authority for appropriating to his own use the proceeds of the newspaper postage, he was unable to point to it. But he stated that he knew it had been repeatedly recognized by the head of the department in London, and he had never considered it incumbent upon him or even proper to inquire into the date or form of the authority. To a committee convinced that everything appertaining to the post office bore the marks of illegality, this answer could not be satisfactory. Stayner was consequently next asked whether he considered that any usage, precedent or custom could give him a right to tax any portion of His Majesty's subjects without the express consent of parliament. To this he replied in the negative, but added that he never doubted that the postmaster general, in permitting his deputy in Canada to send newspapers through the post for a compensation to himself, was borne out by law. What the statute was which the postmaster general held to be his authority, Stayner could not, with confidence, say. But it occurred to him that it might be an act passed in 1763,[247] which confirmed certain officers attached to the principal secretaries of state and to the postmaster general, in the privilege which they long enjoyed of franking newspapers and other printed matter. As a matter of fact, this was the statute cited by the postmaster general when required to produce his authority for allowing Stayner and other deputies to treat the proceeds from newspapers as their perquisites, and as we consider this act, we may admire the prudence with which Stayner declined an argument as to its sufficiency as authority for the practice. Stayner was on firmer ground when he pointed out that the post office act had made no provision for the conveyance of newspapers, and that, as things stood, the only alternatives before the publishers were to pay the prohibitive letter rates on their newspapers, or to come to terms with him, under the permission of the postmaster general. The committee were loath to leave this controversial advantage with Stayner and asked him whether, since the newspapers were carried in the mail bags, he paid from the newspaper postage any part of the mail couriers' wages. He said he did not, and then committed himself to the extraordinary proposition that it cost nothing to carry newspapers because they were in the same bags with the letters. The committee did not waste any time arguing such a point as that, but called the contractor for the conveyance of the mails between Montreal and Quebec, who testified that if he were relieved of the newspapers, he could carry the mails on horseback, at a saving of L200 a year.