“This necessity for cutting the paper into separate sheets before printing, of course, was absolutely inconsistent with printing the newspaper from a continuous scroll. My father applied, therefore, to the Treasury to make arrangements to allow the stamp to be affixed by machinery as the scroll passed through the press (as was indeed done years afterwards), but his request was refused.[88] This decision on the part of the Treasury deferred for something like five-and-thirty years the introduction of the present rotatory printing-press. “The following is a copy of his memorial to the Treasury, and of the answer that he received:— To _The Right Honorable the Chancellor of the Exchequer_. The Memorial of ROWLAND HILL. Sheweth, That your Memorialist has recently obtained His Majesty’s Letters Patent for certain improvements in the method of letter-press printing by machinery, the object of which improvements, besides considerable economy, is a very greatly increased speed in the printing of newspapers, but which object cannot be fully realized unless a change can be permitted in the manner of impressing the Government Stamp upon the newspapers printed by his machines, inasmuch as it is an important part of his plan to make use of the paper, not in separate sheets but in very long scrolls, _i.e._, in the state it is first produced by the modern paper-making machines, each long scroll as it passes rapidly through the printing-machine receiving a series of repetitions of the letter-press. Further that Your Memorialist’s apparatus is so constructed that one complete impression, and no more, is produced by one revolution of the machine, since the types necessary to the printing of a complete impression are arranged around a cylinder, whose surface is by the said types, with the addition of proper marginal spaces, wholly covered, so that each revolution of this cylinder gives exactly one impression. Also That the Government Stamp could readily be attached to the printing cylinder of your Memorialist’s machine, so that each revolution of the cylinder giving an impression of the type, should necessarily give an impression of the Stamp also; and that there are contrivances well known to machinists, and extensively used by them, by which the number of turns made by a machine can be recorded without chance of error or possibility of fraud. The Gas Meter is the most familiar instance, and upon its accuracy the Gas Companies stake their important interests without doubt or hesitation. That