The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

1849-51] MAIL CONVEYANCE. l8l
of .the department; but, for fear of inconvenience to the public, I
hesitated to take the step all at once. To Mr. Tilley, however, I
mentioned, in confidence, a plan which I had conceived for dealing
with unpaid letters, viz., that wherever posted they should be sent in
the first instance to the Metropolitan office, thence to be forwarded
to their respective destinations. This arrangement would have
tended much to economy, as it would have wholly superseded the
" by-accounts," i.e., the accounts between one provincial office and
another. This device I must myself have afterwards forgotten, for cer-
tainly it was never acted upon. Some years later, it was attempted to
make prepayment in respect of inland letters absolutely compulsory,
but public objection proving too strong, the attempt was abandoned.
I believe that this forgotten plan would still be the best step towards
attaining the desired end.
Mail Conveyance.
I discovered instances in which the serious expense of railway
conveyance was incurred, when, speed being unimportant, a cheaper
mode served equally well. It is obviously of no use to a place that
its letters should arrive in the middle of the night, every purpose
being answered if they come in time to be included in the earliest
practicable delivery. Consideration of this led me to propose, in
such cases, the substitution of mail-carts. In one such case this
year the effect was an annual saving of about ,800, and in one in
the following year more than ^2000.*
A Summary.
A statement of the savings which, without counting the rejection
of applications for needless increase of force or salary, I had secured
by the end of 1850, either by prevention of unnecessary augmentation
in expenditure, or by positive reductions, showed an amount
of nearly ^40, ooo a year; although I believe my clerks, in hastily
had made
preparing the statement (for it was suddenly required)
several omissions.
* "June I3th, 1849. The Postmaster-General has approved a proposal of mine
to carry the night-mail between Oxford and the main line of the Great Western
Railway by cart instead of by the branch railway. As the journey both ways is
in the middle of the night nothing whatever is gained to Oxford by the [present]
arrangement." Sir R. Hill's Journal. ED.