acilities or further to reduce the rates. There
should not in any case be a net revenue of any magnitude. The
Commissioners themselves made an estimate of the rate which should
fulfil the requirements they had detailed. In so doing they proceeded on
much the same lines as Sir Rowland Hill in his pamphlet _Post Office
Reform: Its Importance and Practicability_. They had no difficulty in
answering the demand for penny postage in British North America, a
demand based on its successful inauguration in England. The
circumstances in the two countries were not comparable. England, small
and densely populated, the first industrial and commercial nation of the
world, could not in such a matter be compared with a country of vast
extent, sparsely peopled and almost entirely agricultural. While Sir
Rowland Hill had been able to show that in the case of letters conveyed
for comparatively long distances in England the actual cost of carriage
was only one thirty-sixth part of a penny, the Commissioners found that
in British North America the actual average cost of conveyance was no
less than 3d., and the actual average total cost of dealing with letters
no less than 5-1/2d. Uniformity of rate at a penny, which had been
justified in England on existing facts of the service, could therefore
find no similar justification in North America.

There could, however, be no doubt that with a reduction of the rate,
which then averaged 8-1/2d. a letter, the number of letters would be
very greatly increased and the cost per letter consequently reduced. The
public were in the habit of making use of every available means other
than the post for forwarding their letters. Steamboats which carried a
mail would carry outside the mail many times the number of letters that
were enclosed in the mail. Teamsters, stage drivers, and ordinary
travellers all carried large numbers of letters, and in cases where no
such opportunity offered, persons had been known to enclose the letter
in a small package, which could be sent as freight at less charge than
the rate of postage on the single letter. If, therefore, all these
letters, and the many additional letters which would be written if
transmission were cheap and easy, were sent in the mails, the cost of
the service would not be by any means proportionately increased, and the
average cost per letter would be very greatly reduced. It would still,
however, have been considerably more than a penny. Their conclusions