“The ninth class,” said the Secretary, “is packets improperly sent through the Post Office. You may send anything now if you pay the postage.” What could be more obvious than the answer? I gave it as follows: “The fact is, you may send anything now, whether you pay the postage or not.”[216] But the Secretary continued, “The committee is aware that there is no prohibition as to what description of packets persons should put into the Post Office; the only protection to the Post Office at present is the postage that would be charged on such packets.”[217] My answer was easy: “The fact is, that ‘the only protection’ is no protection at all. The Post Office may charge, certainly, but it cannot oblige any one to pay; and the fact of there being a deduction in the Finance Accounts for 1837, amounting to £122,000, for refused, missent, and redirected letters, and so forth, shows that the Post Office is put to a considerable expense for which it obtains no remuneration whatever.” Among the advantages claimed for the proposed use of stamps was the moral benefit of the arrangement; and this was strongly urged by Sir William Brown, who had seen the demoralising effect arising from intrusting young men with money to pay the postage, which, under the existing arrangement, his house was frequently obliged to do.[218] His view was supported by other witnesses. It seems strange now that it should ever have been thought necessary to inquire gravely into the expediency of substituting a simple charge by weight for the complicated arrangement already mentioned. But the innovation was stoutly resisted, and had to be justified; evidence therefore was taken on the question. Lord Ashburton being called on for his opinion, thought that the mode in use was “a hard mode, an unjust mode, and vexatious in its execution.”[219] On the other hand, though the Secretary admitted the frequent occurrence of mistakes, which indeed it must have been impracticable to avoid, viz., “that a great number of letters are charged as double and treble which are not so, and give rise to returns of postage,”[220] and though Sir Edward Lees thought “that charging by weight would, to a certain extent, prevent letters being stolen in their passage through the Post Office,”[221] yet most of the witnesses from the Post Office were unfavourable to taxing by weight. The Superintending President described an experiment made at the office, from which he concluded that a greater number of letters could be taxed in a given time on the plan then in use, than by charging them in proportion to the weight of each letter. The value of this test was pretty well shown by the fact that in this experiment the weighing was not by the proposed half-ounce, but by the _quarter_-ounce scale, and that nearly every letter was put into the scale unless its weight was palpable to the hand.[222]