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PENNY POSTAGE.

"He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
News from all nations lumb'ring at his back;-
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks;

Births, deaths, and marriages; epistles wet

With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods of his fluent quill;

Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains,
Or nymphs responsive."

COWPER.

THE growth of the postal system is a sure measure of the progress of industry, commerce, education, and all that goes to make up the sum of civilization. There is no more striking illustration to be found of the strides which our country has made in that direction since the century began than the introduction of a cheap and rapid delivery of letters, and the craving which it has at once satisfied and augmented. Nothing gives us so forcible an idea of the difference between the Britain of the present day and the Britain of the Caroline, or even of the Georgian period, than the contrast between the postal communication of those times and of our own. We wonder how people got on in the days when the postman was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when even majesty was so badly served that one old postmaster* had to write in self-exculpation of some delay, "When placards are sent [to order the immediate forwarding of some state despatches] the constables many times be fayne to take the horses oute of plowes and cartes; wherein," he gravely adds, "can be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that the country was going ahead, when Cromwell found it worth while to establish posts for the people at large, and was able to farm out the Post Office for £10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment were doubled by the time the Stuarts got back to the throne, and more than doubled again before the close of the seventeenth century. The country has kept on growing out of system after system, like a lad out of his clothes, and at different times has had new ones

* Brian Tuke, master of the post to King Henry VIII.

made to its measure. Brian Tuke's easy plan of borrowing farmers' horses to mount his emissaries on, gave place to regular relays · of post-boys and post-horses; and in course of time, when the robbery of the mails by sturdy highwaymen had become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by a system of stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed guard. This was thought a great advance; and so it was. A pushing, zealous man, named Palmer, originated the scheme. Amidst many other avocations, he found time to travel on the outside of stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coachmen and observing the route, here, there, and everywhere, all over England, and thus matured all the details of his plan from personal experience. "None but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of admiration in the House of Commons, "could have conceived, none but an enthusiast could have practically entertained, none but an enthusiast could have carried out, such a system."

Still, in spite of the exactitude with which Palmer's scheme was declared to fit the wants of the country, it soon began to be grown out of, like the rest. It became too short, too tight, too straitened every way, and impeded the circulation of correspondence, no unimportant artery of our national system. The cost of postage was too high, the mode of delivery too slow; and the consequence was, that people either repressed their desire to write letters, or sent them through some cheaper and illegitimate channel. Sir Walter Scott knew a man who recollected the mail from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single letter! Of all the millions of the modern Babylon, only one solitary individual had got anything to say to anybody in the metropolis of the sister kingdom worth paying postage for. "We look back now," says a popular writer, "with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading times, when warrior husbands and their wives, gray-headed parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence!"

On the 17th of August 1839, through the efforts of Mr. Rowland Hill (why is not the anniversary kept with rejoicings?) penny postage became the law of the land.

During the latter part of the year a uniform fourpenny rate was charged, by way of accustoming people to the cheap system, and saving official feelings from the rude shock of a sudden descent from the respectable rate of a shilling to the vulgar one On the 10th January 1840 the penny system came

of a penny.

into force.

In 1846 a public testimonial of £13,000 was presented to Mr. Hill, in acknowledgment of his distinguished services to the country; and he was afterwards made a Knight of the Bath (Civil Side).

Cheap postage has now been fairly tried, and must be pronounced a grand success. It has become part and parcel of our national life, and has been found precious as the gift of a new faculty. We should miss the loss of cheap and rapid correspondence with our friends and acquaintances almost as much as the loss of speech or the loss of sight. The postman has now to find his way to the humblest, poorest districts, where twenty years back his knock was never heard; and what was once a rare luxury, has now come to be considered a common necessary of life. Instead of only seventy-six millions of letters passing through the post in a year, as in 1838, the number has risen to between five and six hundred millions! On the average, every individual in England receives twenty-two letters a year (in London the individual average is forty-six), in Scotland sixteen, and in Ireland seven.

The gross revenue derived from that source is over £3,000,000; and some of the railway companies make more money out of the conveyance of the mails in a year than the annual revenue of the whole kingdom in the days of William and Mary.

ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE ELECTRIC
TELEGRAPH,

IT has never been difficult for men to devise or interpret symbols. The great difficulty is to traverse space and time with the symbol, -to give meaning to the first four, not the last five letters, of the word Tele-graph.

Now the swiftness of man's foot can do much for us, and still more the swiftness of the horse or the camel. And when these fail us we can employ the wing of the carrier-pigeon; and when that flags, the steamer and the railway locomotive will take up the running for us. But all are too slow for a generation so fast as ours. Sound is so insufficient, that we use it only for short distances. And even Light, though no laggard, is stopped in its progress by the curvature of the earth's surface; besides being nearly useless as a signal at night, and totally so in fogs or cloudy weather. The only agent that will serve our purpose is Electricity. It is far swifter than sound or light. It is not afraid of the dark, and it can travel in all weathers. It can out-rival even the goblin messenger in the old ballad, of whom we are told,—

"And when he came to broken bridge,

He bent his bow and swam;

And when he came to grass growing,

Set down his feet and ran.

And when he came to Greenwood Hali
Would neither knock nor call;

But set his bent bow to his breast,
And lightly leaped the wall."

The highway for this subtle spirit—which, together with the generating and propelling apparatus at the one end, and the receiving and recording instruments at the other, constitutes the Electric Telegraph-is in one sense the lineal descendant of the older methods of speaking and writing to a distance. But its purely scientific parents are the Compass Needle and the Electrical Machine.

As the guide of Columbus to the New World, the magnetic

needle was the precursor and pioneer of the Telegraph. Silently, and as with finger on its lips, it led him across the waste of waters. And the time cannot now be distant when, as an integrant of the Telegraph, it will remove its finger and break silence, so that the inhabitants of the old and the new hemispheres may exchange affectionate greetings. The quivering magnetic needle which lies in the coil of the galvanometer, is the tongue of the Electric Telegraph, and already engineers talk of it as speaking.

The magnet, however, did not till 1820 directly aid the Telegraph, What, then, of the other parent? We strike sharply, in beginning, on a definite date, 1600, when Gilbert of Colchester introduced the new word, and the all but new science, Electricity. The science, thus recognised and titled, made rapid progress. The lump of amber was changed for a fragment of sulphur, which soon grew into a globe, and was by-and-by replaced by a glass sphere, a cylinder, or a plate, whirled rapidly, and constituting an Electrical Machine. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, men knew well how to produce electricity. And soon afterwards they discovered that some bodies conduct, and others do not conduct it; so that they were in possession of the essential halves of an electrical highway, namely, conductors free through half their length, and insulated through the other half by non-conductors.

In 1745 the Leyden Jar was stumbled on. It was literally an electrical condenser, and did as much to enhance the power of the friction-machine as Watt's steam-condenser did to enlarge that of the steam-engine. Provided with the Leyden Jar, the next two important telegraphic discoveries were speedily made : the one, that electricity traverses a metallic wire with inconceivable rapidity; the other, that it travels with equal celerity through earth or water. Here, then, were two-thirds of the Telegraph supplied; the message-sender was there, and so was the messagecarrier. Why was not a message-receiver also provided? The fault lay with the sender. Friction-electricity is so brief in duration, and so intense and impetuous, that it cannot be induced to take a long journey. The best conductors, in their best state of insulation, are unwelcome to it. If there is the least obstacle in any part of

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