tension of education was
proceeding in a much quicker ratio; and we may therefore fairly assume
that the proportion of those who make their marks in the marriage-register
has greatly diminished since 1844.

But, during the last ten years, the natural desire to learn to write, of
that part of the youthful population which education can reach, has
received a great moral impulse by a wondrous development of the most
useful and pleasurable exercise of that power. The uniform penny postage
has been established. In the year 1838, the whole number of letters
delivered in the United Kingdom was seventy-six millions; in this year
that annual delivery has reached the prodigious number of three hundred
and thirty-seven millions. In 1838, a Committee of the House of Commons
thus denounced, among the great commercial evils of the high rates of
postage, their injurious effects upon the great bulk of the people. They
either act as a grievous tax on the poor, causing them to sacrifice their
little earnings to the pleasure and advantage of corresponding with their
distant friends, or compel them to forego such intercourse altogether;
thus subtracting from the small amount of their enjoyments, and
obstructing the growth and maintenance of their best affections. Honored
be the man who broke down these barriers! Praised be the Government that,
_for once_, stepping out of its fiscal tram-way, dared boldly to legislate
for the domestic happiness, the educational progress, and the moral
elevation of the masses! The steel pen, sold at the rate of a penny a
dozen, is the creation, in a considerable degree, of the Penny Postage
stamp; as the Penny Postage stamp was a representative, if not a creation,
of the new educational power. Without the steel pen, it may reasonably be
doubted whether there were mechanical means within the reach of the great
bulk of the population for writing the three hundred and thirty-seven
millions of letters that now annually pass through the Post Office.

Othello's sword had "the ice-brook's temper;" but not all the real or
imaginary virtues of the stream that gave its value to the true Spanish
blade could create the elasticity of a steel pen. Flexible, indeed, is the
Toledo. If thrust against a wall, it will bend into an arc that describes
three-fourths of a circle. The problem to be solved in the steel-pen, is
to convert the iron of Dannemora into a substance as thin as the quill of
a dove's pinion, but as strong as