THE PORT OF LIVERPOOL 195 



on fifty-three years and a half of postal service, he 

 is warranted in accounting himself, if his modesty 

 allow, not merely the official on the active list of 

 longest service, but the possessor of the widest know- 

 ledge of the inner working of the Post-Office of any 

 one of its servants. Except the reduction of high 

 rates of charge to uniform penny postage, he has 

 seen every modern change in the mode of carry- 

 ing on the business of the department, and has 

 taken no small share in the preparations for most 

 of them. 



It startles me to think of the phases of progress 

 which the Liverpool post-office has witnessed, even 

 within my own experience. In 1851 I found the 

 electric telegraph, then in the hands of a private com- 

 pany, established in two rooms in No. 1, North John 

 Street, at the corner of Dale Street. There were three 

 double-needle instruments, eight or ten clerks, and as 

 many messengers — a score of persons all told, and 

 the annual cost, perhaps, was a thousand pounds. 

 There are now nearly a thousand telegraph officials, 

 who cost more than fifty thousand pounds a year, 

 and the number of telegraph instruments working 

 from the chief office and the office in the Stock 

 Exchange is nearly two hundred. 



As for letters, in 1851, when I first knew Liverpool, 

 the post-office delivered, I believe, fewer than two 

 hundred thousand letters a week ; whereas now, in 

 1895, I must estimate them at over thirteen hundred 

 thousand. They absorb the services of a brigade of 



