w the best Markets!

MERCHANTS AND TRADESMEN that wish to receive Orders and Money quickly
and cheaply!

MECHANICS AND LABOURERS that wish to learn where good work and high
wages are to be had! _support_ the Report of the House of Commons with
your Petitions for an UNIFORM PENNY POST. Let every City and Town and
Village, every Corporation, every Religious Society and Congregation,
petition, and let every one in the kingdom sign a Petition with his name
or his mark.

THIS IS NO QUESTION OF PARTY POLITICS.

Lord Ashburton, a Conservative, and one of the richest Noblemen in the
country, spoke these impressive words before the House of Commons
Committee--"Postage is one of the worst of our Taxes; it is, in fact,
taxing the conversation of people who live at a distance from each
other. The communication of letters by persons living at a distance is
the same as a communication by word of mouth between persons living in
the same town."

"Sixpence," says Mr. Brewin, "is the third of a poor man's income; if a
gentleman, who had 1,000_l._ a year, or 3_l._ a day, had to pay
one-third of his daily income, a sovereign, for a letter, how often
would he write letters of friendship! Let a gentleman put that to
himself, and then he will be able to see how the poor man cannot be able
to pay Sixpence for his Letter."

* * *

READER!

If you can get any Signatures to a Petition, make two Copies of the
above on two half sheets of paper; get them signed as numerously as
possible; fold each up separately; put a slip of paper around, leaving
the ends open; direct one to a Member of the House of Lords, the other
to a Member of the House of Commons, LONDON, and put them into the Post
Office.

* * *

_Reproduced from a handbill in the collection of the late Sir Henry
Cole, K.C.B. By permission of Lady Cole._

* * * * *

Should any reader desire to inform himself with some degree of fulness
of the stages through which the Penny Postage agitation passed, he
cannot do better than peruse Sir Henry Cole's _Fifty Years of Public
Work_.

The Postmaster-General, speaking at the Jubilee Meeting at the London
Guildhall, on the 16th May last, thus contrasted the work of 1839 with
that of 1889: "Although I would not to-night weary an assemblage like
this with tedious and tiresome figures, it may be at least permitted to
me to remind you tha