While thus confirmed in my belief that, even from a financial point of view, the postal rates were injuriously high, I also became more and more convinced, the more I considered the question, that the fiscal loss was not the most serious injury thus inflicted on the public; that yet more serious evil resulted from the obstruction thus raised to the moral and intellectual progress of the people; and that the Post Office, if put on a sound footing, would assume the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilisation; that though now rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements, it was capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of national education. I became also more alive to the consideration that the duty of rendering its operation as beneficial as possible, incumbent as this must be on any institution, became doubly so on the Post Office, from its being a monopoly; that, as it forbade all others to perform its functions, it was bound to render its own performance as complete as possible.[104] Of this view I found strong confirmation in the recent report of a Government Commission.[105] Being thus fully convinced that the present arrangements were wrong, I had next to inquire as to the changes most effectual for redress. As I had never yet been within the walls of any Post Office[106] (an advantage which was, indeed, reserved for me until after the adoption of my plan), my only sources of information, for the time, consisted in those heavy blue books, in which invaluable matter too often lies hidden amidst heaps of rubbish. Into some of these, as previously implied, I had already dipped; but Mr. Wallace having supplied me by post with an additional half hundred weight of raw material, I now commenced that systematic study, analysis, and comparison, which the difficulty of my self-imposed task rendered necessary. I started, however, with the simple notion that rates must be reduced,—but soon came to the conclusion that such reduction might be carried to a considerable extent not only without loss to the revenue, but with positive benefit; that a larger reduction might be made without loss, and a still larger without drawing upon the surplus beyond a reasonable extent.[107] The question to be decided therefore was, how far the total reduction might safely be carried; and this involved two preliminary inquiries; first, what would be the probable increase of correspondence consequent upon such or such reduction; secondly, what would be the augmentation of expense consequent upon such increase.