In addition to the injury to health involved in the labour by which these improvements have been achieved, I have had to submit to a sacrifice of income. Mine is, I believe, the only important office in the whole department with no scale of increase of salary; but for the special limitation which my promised promotion would remove, I should be now in the receipt of £1,500 a year--that is £400 a year less than Colonel Maberly had during his first five years of office, and £500 a year less than he has at present. If Government is still of opinion that it cannot immediately fulfil its promise, I beg that you will urge my claim at least so far as to press that a period may now be fixed beyond which the complete performance of the promise shall not be delayed; and that, seeing the impossibility of continuing the present state of things, arrangements be at once made for the nearest approximation to such performance that may be deemed practicable. I remain, My dear Sir, Yours faithfully, ROWLAND HILL. P.S.--I have enclosed a copy of a letter with which you favoured me on the 27th of November, 1846, and which bears strongly on the case. HENRY WARBURTON, Esq. APPENDIX H. [See p. 215.] _Letter to Postmaster-General (Lord Canning)._ General Post Office, 18th June, 1853. MY DEAR LORD,--As your Lordship is already acquainted with many of the statements I am about to make, you will at once perceive that in writing at such length my view is in accordance with your understood wish so to prepare the case for the Chancellor of the Exchequer as to supersede the necessity of reference to former correspondence on the subject. In September 1842, in the midst of what the Treasury was pleased to consider an able discharge of duties connected with the institution of my system of Penny Postage, I learnt that my services were no longer required, and I spent the next four years in private life, except so much of the year 1843 as was occupied in preparing and laying before a committee of the House of Commons a full exposition of the operation of the Post Office as then conducted, in the course of which I demonstrated that the existing system of management, besides depriving the public of many reasonable facilities, involved an enormous loss of revenue. In December, 1846, my friend Mr. Warburton intimated to me the desire of Her Majesty's Government again to employ me in developing and perfecting my plans, and that they were prepared to offer me a permanent engagement at the Post Office.