An arrangement for transmitting money through the Post Office was, I found, in great use, or what I thought such, while our money-order system, owing to the high rates of charge and other causes had but a very limited operation; the yearly amount transmitted being less than half that in France. Meanwhile, there had appeared in the “Quarterly Review” an elaborate attack, said to have been written by Mr. Croker, on my whole plan and all its supporters; the Mercantile Committee, the Parliamentary Committee, the witnesses, and, above all, the Government, receiving each a share of the reproaches which fell primarily upon myself. A few extracts from this article may still interest or amuse my readers. It contains one statement of some importance, which, had I recollected it at the proper time, would have been useful in a recent discussion as to the origin of postage stamps:— “M. Piron tells us that the idea of a post-paid envelope originated early in the reign of Louis XIV. with M. de Valayer, who, in 1653, established (with royal approbation) a private penny post, placing boxes at the corners of the streets for the reception of letters wrapped up in envelopes, which were to be bought at offices established for that purpose.... “But this device had long been forgotten even in France; and we have no doubt that when Mr. Charles Knight, an extensive publisher as well as an intelligent literary man, proposed, some years since, a stamped cover for the circulation of newspapers, he was under no obligation for the idea to Monsieur de Valayer. Mr. Hill, adopting Mr. Knight’s suggestion, has applied it to the general purposes of the Post Office with an ingenuity and address which make it his own.”[284] My statement that the Post Office revenue had remained stationary during the twenty years preceding the writing of my pamphlet is pronounced by the writer to be completely overthrown by the fact that the Post Office revenue had doubled during the fifteen years preceding that period.[285] Expectation of moral benefits from low postage is thus met:— “On the whole we feel that, so far from the _exclusive_ benefits to ‘_order_, _morals_, and _religion_’ which Mr. Hill and the committee put forward, there is, at least, as great a chance of the contrary mischief, and that the proposed penny post might perhaps be more justly characterised as ‘_sedition made easy_.’”[286] The reader of the present day, whom dire necessity has accustomed to modern hardships, will be roused to a sense of his condition by learning that “prepayment by means of a stamp or stamped cover is universally admitted to be quite the reverse of convenient, foreign to the habits of the people,”[287] &c. The attack was answered in the next number of the “Edinburgh Review” in an article written by my eldest brother, which thus concludes:—