THE POST OFFICE. ^H 



largely to the revenue of the Post Office, because the 

 public would consider it the surest conveyance, and 

 be willing, therefore, to pay more for it than they 

 did to the proprietors of coaches ; in short, that 

 the parcel-post would always be preferred. But you 

 could not, in the then existing state of things, send 

 a small valuable parcel by the mail from any post- 

 office. He also thought that no person would object 

 to pay a high rate of insurance to be certain of 

 the safe transmission of a valuable parcel by the 

 mail. > 



The establishment of a parcel-post with the old 

 mails would have been impracticable, and its proposer 

 must have been unacquainted with the difficulty there 

 was in finding room in the mail-coaches for all the 

 letters and papers only, without any addition in the 

 way of parcels, for the conveyance of which the 

 coachman had barely room in the limited space in 

 the front-boot, which was partly occupied with the 

 passengers' luggage. 



It is now, as I have shown, nearly fifty years since 

 this idea of having a parcel-post in connection with 

 the Post Office was mooted, and at that time the 

 rate of postage was in proportion to the distance a 

 letter had to travel, and also whether it was single 

 or double. But even with the rate of postage high 

 as it then was, according to the statement of an 



