The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

The amount of Government postage is, on
APPENDIX I. 467
the average, about .... ^150,000 per annum.*
Of which that of the Post Office itself is
about ...... 40,000
Leaving for the other Departments about ^110,000
The postage of the Post Office itself cannot affect the Net
Revenue, seeing that it is included in the expenditure as well as
in the gross receipt It may, therefore, be left out of consideration.
As regards the correspondence of the other Government departments,
if it were right to deduct the postage of it from the revenue
of the Post Office, it is obvious that it would also be right to deduct
the cost of its conveyance and delivery from the expenditure of the
Post Office. The net revenue would therefore be reduced, not by
the full sum of ^110,000 above mentioned, but by that amount less
the cost of conveyance and delivery ; in other words, by the profit
the Post Office obtains on the official correspondence. It is to be
borne in mind, however, that official postage is, in nearly all cases,
charged by weighing the letters not individually, but in the gross ; a
mode of procedure which, if applied to private correspondence,
would reduce the rate of charge for such correspondence by about
one-half; and although, owing to the greater average weight of
official letters, the reduction of charge is not so great as one-half,
it may be doubted whether the remaining charge be sufficient to
leave any profit to the Post Office, so that, whether the amount
received and the cost incurred for the conveyance and delivery of
official correspondence be, or be not, included in the calculation, the
net revenue of the Post Office could be but very slightly affected.
It may be added that the postage charged against the various
Government departments is actually paid into the coffers of the
Post Office, and is not merely a statistical record.
(&.) The proceeds of the impressed stamp on newspapers is an
item regarding which the claim of the Post Office to include it in the
receipts is sufficiently established by reference to the fact that,
though this part of the revenue is collected by another department,
the sole purpose for which the stamp is now resorted to is to obtain
for the newspaper the advantage of postal transmission. At the
same time, it may be added, that the proceeds in question, amounting
for the year 1 86 1, to ^"134,571,! are by no means a remuneration
* "Eighth Report of Postmaster-General," p. 31.
t " Eighth Report
of Postmaster-General," p. 20.
H II 2