itary in character, and were identified
with the military routes.[111]

In 1816 Daniel Sutherland was appointed Deputy Postmaster-General for
Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Under his administration the
development of the service was pushed forward, and so far as was found
consistent with the interests of revenue, new offices and routes were
established. But in 1820 there were still no more than forty-nine post
offices in the whole of British North America, distributed thus: in
Lower Canada twenty offices, in Upper Canada nineteen, in Nova Scotia
six, in New Brunswick three, and in Prince Edward Island one. The
progress was from this time somewhat more rapid. By 1824 the number of
offices in the Canadas alone had risen to sixty-nine, and during the
next ten or fifteen years the growth, both of Post Office accommodation
and of Post Office revenue, was more rapid than the growth of
population.

The settlers were not, however, completely satisfied. Their complaints
were to some extent laid against the administration of the office--they
claimed, for example, that gross overcharges of postage were being made,
through incorrect computation of the distances on the post roads--but
they became more and more dissatisfied that the control of the whole of
the service and its officers should rest with the Postmaster-General in
England. The question was, of course, to a large extent political, and
one only among the several general grievances of the colonists at this
period, which caused so much anxiety to the Home authorities.

As early as 1819 a movement began in Upper Canada to obtain the
transference of the administration to the provincial authorities. A
Committee of the House of Assembly considered the abuses of the existing
Post Office system, and on presentation of their report, in March 1820,
the House passed a resolution condemning the administration of the
service. The question continued to receive a good deal of attention. The
chief complaint of the colonists was that a net revenue was year by year
transmitted to London. There is no doubt that a balance was paid over to
the Imperial administration year by year, but it is questionable whether
any of this balance was a net revenue on the local service.[112] The
colonists chose so to regard it. They advanced the contention that the
legal right of the Imperial Government to levy postage rates in the
colonies at all was doubtful, because postage was a tax; and the rai