Then there was the franking privilege, by means of which all letters franked by peers and members of Parliament went free. Members of Parliament sometimes signed franks by the packet and gave them to constituents and friends. A trade was actually carried on in franks by the servants of members of Parliament, and their practice was to ask their masters to sign the franks in great numbers at a time. Forgery of franks was a frequent offence. About seventy years ago an old Irish lady informed a Post Office servant that she seldom paid any postage for letters, and that her correspondence never cost her friends anything. The official asked her how she managed this. “Oh,” she said, “I just wrote 'Fred. Suttie' in the corner of the cover of the letter and then, sure, nothing more was charged for it.” She was asked, “Were you not afraid of being hanged for forgery?” “Oh, dear, no,” she replied, “nobody ever heard of a lady being hanged in Ireland, and troth I did just what everybody else did.” The system of payment on delivery of a letter was the cause of perpetual delays and numerous frauds. When a postman was obliged to collect at every house the necessary postage, it was extremely difficult to regulate his rounds. The temptation to defraud the Post Office, his master, was also frequently yielded to by him. A large amount of money was every year obviously being lost to the Post Office in these different ways. A public opinion was in existence that the charges of the Post Office were unjust and excessive, and the moral sense of the community was not always alive enough to recognise any wrong in dodging the Government. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: MAIL COACH AND TRAIN.] When railways were in their infancy part of the journey of a mail was sometimes performed by coach and part by train. At the point where the railway began the coach was placed on a truck, which was coupled to the train. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To put the matter briefly, the rate for a single inland letter in 1837 was 4d. for 15 miles, 6d. for 30 miles, 7d. for 50 miles, and so on up to 1s. for each additional hundred miles: in certain places only was there a local penny post, and in London there were twopenny and threepenny posts. Each person in the United Kingdom received on an average only five posted packets a year. This was the year when the change from mail coach to mail train was most marked. A mail was conveyed from London to Liverpool and Manchester in 16½ hours: the secret of the speed was that the mail was carried by coach from London to Birmingham, and there put on the railway which was open to Liverpool and Manchester. The last of the mail coaches, that from Norwich and Newmarket, arrived in London on the 6th January 1846.