Post Haste by R. M. Ballantyne (mystery books to read .txt) 📕

should enable him to get over the bar. A French privateer chanced to be on the look-out in these waters, and pounced upon James Vickers, who was either unable or unwilling to fight. The French captain stripped the ‘Grace Dogger’—as the chronicler writes—‘of rigging, sails, spars, yards, and all furniture wherewith she had been provided for due accommodation of passengers, leaving not so much as a spoone, or a naile, or a hooke to hang anything on.’ Having thus made a clean sweep of her valuables, and having no use for the hull, the Frenchman ransomed the ‘Grace Dogger’ to poor J.V. for fifty guineas, which the Post-Office had to pay!

“But our mail-packets were not always thus easily or summarily mastered. Sometimes they fought and conquered, but, whatever happened, the result was invariably productive of expense, because wounded men had to be cared for and cured or pensioned. Thus one Edward James had a donation of 5 pounds, because ‘a musket shot had grazed the tibia of his left leg.’ What the tibia may be, my young friends, is best known to the doctors—I have not taken the trouble to inquire!” (Hear, hear, and applause.) “Then another got 12 pounds ‘because a shot had divided his frontal muscles and fractured his skull;’ while a third received a yearly pension of 6 pounds, 13 shillings, 4 pence ‘on account of a shot in the hinder part of the head, whereby a large division of scalp was made.’ Observe what significance there is in that fourpence! Don’t it speak eloquently of the strict justice of the Post-Office authorities of those days? Don’t it tell of tender solicitude on their part thus to gauge the value of gunshot wounds? Might it not be said that the men were carefully rated when wounded? One Postmaster-General writes to an agent at Falmouth in regard to rates: ‘Each arm or leg amputated above the elbow or knee is 8 pounds per annum; below the knee, 20 nobles. Loss of sight of one eye, 4 pounds; of pupil of the eye, 5 pounds; of sight of both eyes, 12 pounds; of pupils of both eyes, 14 pounds.’ Our well-known exactitude began to crop up, you see, even in those days.

“The post-boys—who in many instances were grey-headed men—also gave the authorities much trouble, many of them being addicted to strong drink, and not a few to dilatory habits and dishonesty. One of them was at one time caught in the act of breaking the laws. At that period the bye-posts were farmed, but the post-boys, regardless of farmers’ rights, often carried letters and brought back answers on their own account—receiving and keeping the hire, so that neither the Post-Office nor the farmer got the benefit. The particular boy referred to was convicted and committed to prison, but as he could not get bail—having neither friends nor money—he begged to be whipped instead! His petition was granted, and he was accordingly whipped to his heart’s content—or, as the chronicler has it, he was whipped ‘to the purpose.’

“Many men of great power and energy contributed to the advance of the Post-Office in those times. I won’t burden your minds with many of their names however. One of them, William Dockwra, started a penny post in London for letters and small parcels in 1683. Twenty-three years later an attempt was made to start a halfpenny post in London, but that was suppressed.

“Soon after that a great man arose named Ralph Allen. He obtained a lease of the cross posts from Government for life at 6000 pounds a year. By his wisdom and energy he introduced vast improvements in the postal system, besides making a profit of 12,000 pounds a year, which he lived to enjoy for forty-four years, spending much of his fortune in charity and in the exercise of hospitality to men of learning and genius.

“About the middle of last century—the eighteenth—the Post-Office, although greatly increased in efficiency, was an insignificant affair compared with that of the present day. It was bound to pay into the Exchequer 700 pounds a week. In Ireland and Scotland improvements also went on apace, but not so rapidly as in England, as might have been expected, considering the mountainous nature of these countries. In Scotland the first modern stage-coach was introduced in 1776. The same year a penny post was started in Edinburgh by a certain Peter Williamson of Aberdeen, who was a keeper of a coffee-stall in the Parliament House, and his experiment was so successful that he had to employ four carriers to deliver and collect letters. These men rang a bell on their rounds and wore a uniform. Others soon entered into competition, but the Post-Office authorities came forward, took the local penny post in hand, and pensioned Williamson off.

“It was not till the end of the century that the Post-Office made one of its greatest and most notable strides.

“The Mail-coach Era followed that of the post-boys, and was introduced by Mr John Palmer, manager of the Bath theatre. The post-boys had become so unbearably slow and corrupt that people had taken to sending valuable letters in brown paper parcels by the coaches, which had now begun to run between most of the great towns. Palmer, who afterwards became Controller-General of the Post-Office, proposed that mail-bags should be sent by passenger-coaches with trusty and armed guards. His advice, after some opposition, was acted on, and thus the mails came to travel six miles an hour, instead of three or four—the result being an immediate increase of correspondence, despite an increase of postage. Rapidity, security, regularity, economy, are the great requisites in a healthy postal system. Here, then, was an advance in at least two of these. The advance was slight, it is true, but once more, I repeat, we ought not to turn up our noses at the day of small things.” (Little Grigs was going to repeat “Hear! hear!” but thought better of it and checked himself.) “Of course there was opposition to the stage-coaches. There always is and will be opposition to everything in a world of mixed good and evil.” (The Scotsman here thought of repeating “Hear! hear!” but refrained.) “One pamphleteer denounced them as the ‘greatest evil that had happened of late years in these kingdoms,—mischievous to the public, prejudicial to trade, and destructive to lands. Those who travel in these coaches contract an idle habit of body, become weary and listless when they had rode a few miles, and were unable to travel on horseback, and not able to endure frost, snow, or rain, or to lodge in the fields.’ Opposition for ever! So it ever is. So it was when foot-runners gave place to horsemen; so it was when horseflesh succumbed to steam. So it will be when electro-galvanic aerial locomotives take the place—.” (The remainder of the sentence was lost in laughter and rapturous applause.) “But roads were still intolerably bad. Stage-coach travelling was a serious business. Men made their wills before setting out on a journey. The journey between Edinburgh and London was advertised to last ten days in summer, and twelve in winter, and that, too, in a so-called ‘flying machine on steel springs.’ But, to return:— Our infant, having now become a sturdy youth, advanced somewhat more rapidly. In 1792 a money-order office was set on foot for the first time. It had been originally undertaken by some post-office clerks on their own account, but was little used until the introduction of the penny postage. Great reforms were made in many departments. Among them was an Act passed to authorise the sending of letter-bags by private ships. This originated the ship-letter system, by which letters are now conveyed to every part of the world visited by private ships.

“Another mighty influence for good was the introduction (about 1818) of macadamised roads, which brought travelling up to the point of ten miles an hour. So also was the opening for use in 1829 of St. Martin’s-le-Grand—a grand event this, in every sense of the word.” (Here a member objected to punning, and was immediately hooted out of countenance.)

“With mail-coaches, macadamised roads, security, ten miles an hour, and a vastly increased revenue, the Post-Office seemed to have reached the highest heights of prosperity. The heights from which we now look down upon these things ought to make us humble in our estimate of the future! We have far surpassed the wildest dreams of those days, but there were some points of picturesque interest in which we can never surpass them. Ah! boys,” said Solomon, looking up with a gleam of enthusiasm in his eyes, “I mind the old mail-coaches well. They had for a long time before I knew them reached their best days. It was about the year 1820 that most of the post-roads had been macadamised, and the service had reached its highest state of efficiency. In 1836 there were fifty four-horse mails in England, thirty in Ireland, and ten in Scotland, besides forty-nine two-horse mails in England. Those who have not seen the starting of the mail-coaches from the General Post-Office can never understand the magnificence and excitement of that scene. The coaches were clean, trim, elegant, and glittering; the blood-horses were the finest that could be procured, groomed to perfection, and full of fire; the drivers and guards were tried and trusty men of mettle, in bright scarlet costume—some of the former being lords, baronets, and even parsons! It was a gay and stirring sight when the insides and outsides were seated, when the drivers seized their reins, and the bugles sounded, the whips cracked, the impatient steeds reared, plunged, or sprang away, and the Royal Mails flew from the yard of St. Martin’s-le-Grand towards every corner of the Kingdom.

“Their progress, too, was a sort of royal progress—a triumphal march. Wherever they had to pass, crowds of people waited for them in subdued excitement, hailed them with delight, and waved them on with cheers, for they were almost the only means of distributing news; and when a great victory, such as Trafalgar, Vittoria, or Waterloo had to be announced, the mail-coaches—dressed in flowers and ribbons, with guards shouting the news to eager crowds as they passed through hamlet, village, and town—swept like a thrill of electric fire throughout the land. News was news in those days! You didn’t get it at all till you got it altogether, and then you got it like a thunderbolt. There was no dribbling of advance telegrams; no daily papers to spread the news (or lies), and contradict ’em next day, in the same columns with commentaries or prophetic remarks on what might or should have been, but wasn’t, until news got muddled up into a hopeless entanglement, so that when all was at last cleared up you’d been worried out of all your interest in it! Yes, my lads, although I would not wish to see the return of those stirring days, I’m free to assert that the world lost something good, and that it was not all clear gain when the old four-in-hand Royal Mail coaches drove out of the present into the past, and left the Iron Horse in possession of the field.

“But nothing can arrest the hand of Time. When mail-coaches were at their best, and a new Great North Road was being laid out by Telford, the celebrated engineer, another celebrated engineer, named Stephenson, was creating strange commotion among the coal-pits of the North. The iron horse was beginning to snort. Soon he began to shriek and claw the rails. Despite the usual opposition, he succeeded in asserting himself, and, in the words of a disconsolate old mail-coach guard, ‘men began to make a gridiron of old England.’ The romance of the road had faded away. No more for the old guard were there to be the exciting bustle of the start, the glorious rush out of the smoky town into the bright country; the crash through hamlet and village;