The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

1855-9] MR. PLINY MILES. 319
satisfactory, was replied to with a full statement of objections ; an
offer being made at the same time to submit the whole matter,
if needful, to the arbitration of a third party. Instead, however,
of making any rejoinder to this, the American Postmaster-General,
in his next Annual Report, while entirely passing over the offer of
arbitration, represented England as acting so unsatisfactorily, " that
for the present no disposition is felt to pursue the matter further."*
Any one wishing to satisfy himself as to the respective merits of the
parties in this proceeding will find the necessary documents in the
Appendix to the Sixth Report of the British Postmaster-General,
P- 57-
Before the English rejoinder could be made, however, the mis-
representations so boldly put forth raised an outcry in America,
which was partly echoed here. Error in this country, so far as it
went, was likely to disappear, or at least to become harmless, as soon
as the next Annual Report came out; but in America, correction,
if left to ordinary means, would doubtless have been found very
slow. Fortunately, as might be expected in so energetic a nation,
the need called forth the man ; and so much as one man could do
for diffusing sound knowledge on the whole subject was done by
the late Mr. Pliny Miles ; who, in his zeal for postal reform a zeal,
I must remark, rarely leading him into any inaccuracy published
more on the general subject in America than ever I did in England,
travelled widely also in the Union, to urge his views by word of
mouth, and several times crossed the Atlantic for the furtherance
of his object. I must forestall events so far as to add that, long as
he had to labour, and often as he endured disappointment, he
happily lived to see his efforts rewarded with a large measure of
success, t I must also so far anticipate here as to express the
pleasure with which I have heard during late years of a total
change in the spirit of the American Post Office, the new autho-
rities of which have, I am informed, shown the utmost readiness
* " Sixth Report," p. 20.
t Since the above was written, a passage, though an erroneous one, in an
interesting and popular work, has reminded me of another American labourer
in the field of postal improvement. One of Miss Mitford's letters would seem
to show that as early as 1832, or four years before my pamphlet was written, she
went to hear Mr. Elihu Burritt lecture on ocean penny postage. A letter lately
received from Mr. Burritt informs me that he never visited England before 1846,
and never worked in the cause of postal reform but in sequence to myself.
Explanation of the error may easily be found by reference to the difficulty which
must have been encountered in piecing together, with even plausible correctness,
the scraps of paper on which Miss Mitford's letters were habitually written.