At a yet earlier date than this, however, though how many years before I do not know, I had given some little thought to the subject of more rapid locomotion; having mainly in view, I believe, the speedier conveyance of the mail. I had considered, as well as some others, the question of propulsion by steam, being of course entirely unaware of the great invention then progressing in the mind of George Stephenson; and, indeed, having no notion that the laying of a railway would be a necessary preliminary. Steam, however, I soon abandoned for a more potent as well as more portable agent, viz., gunpowder;[94] and with this I made some experiments; but these proving unsatisfactory, I carried my researches no further, and so escaped, perhaps, a serious explosion. My next memorandum bears date January 11th, 1830, and suggests the feasibility of conveying the mails through tubes by atmospheric means; but this, also, remained a crude and unpublished conception. I have already mentioned[95] that our opinion was from first to last, and without reserve or exception, in favour of free trade. Such being our views, we had welcomed with joy the gradual relaxation of the protective system, which, commencing under Mr. Huskisson, never absolutely stopped until protection was no more. We had remarked, with satisfaction, that the lowering of the tariff had not produced a corresponding reduction in the public revenue; and we indulged in sanguine hopes that, even where reduction appeared in a particular department, it either would be temporary or would be made up in some other. The year 1835 having brought a large surplus in the general revenue, we naturally speculated as to its application in the reduction of duties;[96] and it was then that my thoughts first turned earnestly to the Post Office. I now examined more in detail the result of the late financial reforms: and I found (as subsequently stated in my pamphlet[97]) that in the reductions hitherto made, the relation between the relief to the public and the loss to the revenue had varied greatly; so that, while in the instance of leather and soap the reduction of one half of the duty had eventually caused to the revenue a loss of one third, in that of coffee the same reduction had actually produced a gain of one half. This brought me to the conclusion that, “when a reduction of taxation is about to take place, it is exceedingly important that great care and judgment should be exercised in the selection of the tax to be reduced, in order that the maximum of relief may be afforded to the public with the minimum of injury to the revenue.”[98]