The committee endeavoured to convict Stayner of having misled the postmaster general as to the magnitude of his income. They were unsuccessful in this attempt, as the postmaster general was quite aware of the amount Stayner was receiving, and had expressed no disapproval. The committee as a conclusion to its report urged that the provincial government should take over the control of the provincial post office, and they submitted the draft of a bill which they had prepared for the purpose of sanctioning the action recommended. The house of assembly adopted the report of the committee, and having passed the bill, sent it up to the legislative council for approval. In the legislative council the bill was rejected. The majority of the council were Stayner's friends, and they saw that he had a full chance to express his views before a committee appointed by the council. He set the draft bill prepared by the postmaster general beside the assembly bill, and effectively contrasted the strong points of the former with the weakness of the latter. The imperial bill, Stayner emphasised before the committee of the council, dealt with British North America as one territory as regards regulations and charges, and in his opinion, unless the several provinces were to be so regarded, an efficient service among the provinces themselves, and between the provinces and other countries, would be impossible. In order to encourage correspondence between the distant parts of the colonies, the imperial bill fixed the comparatively low rate of eighteen pence for all distances beyond five hundred miles. Thus a letter could be sent from Amherstburg to Halifax or Charlottetown for that sum. If each colony had its own separate postal administration the charge on letters passing between those places would, in the most favourable circumstances, cost two or three times as much. Stayner was far from agreeing that, in all its details, the imperial bill was perfect, but he was convinced that the principle on which it was based was the only practicable one. The great objection Stayner saw in the bill of the assembly was that it was a local bill operative only within the province. Intercourse between Lower Canada and the other provinces had to be provided for, since where there are several states under one supreme head, the free exchange of correspondence between them is indispensable. The British government, whose interests in the different provinces required that communication between them and the mother country should be uninterrupted, could never consent, Stayner was sure, to any local arrangements by which those communications might be jeopardized. The cost of communication between province and province would be prohibitive, and the consequence would be moral isolation. The separate states of the American Union, jealous as they were of any impairment of their rights, recognized the necessity of a common postal service.