PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
C.O.
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8855 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
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and the greatest influence-in South Australia, New South Wales, and New Zealand. Even in the other Colonies there is merely a doubt as to the financial bearings of the question and a pardonable fear of foreign ships. I am bound to express my regret that there is not a combination of the Australian Colonies, so that we might have a federal service instead of one which is divided between half-a-dozen lines. But this arises from the divided state of Australian matters generally."
All this necessarily refers to the arrangements for the conveyance of letters from the Colonies to England, and I am at a loss to know how you could have imagined me to be silent on the subject. But even assuming that I had been silent, I do not gather that you anticipate any difficulty or any cause of " At any rate, if you do, you do not say so.
"impracticability' "in that quarter.
7. Then as to whether the proposed system would be self-supporting. You take up several points, which I will deal with seriatim. You cannot admit that letters can be compared with freight, or be treated in all respects like freight." Nobody alleges it. What I did was to point out that the freight for ordinary goods by first class steamships to Australia was 27, while the freight for letters amounted to 1,7921. ton. I maintained that we should pay 1001. per ton for letters, and this would enable us to establish penny postage and still bave a profit of 2001. or 3001. per ton. (See paragraph II. of my letter of 25th September 1886, and paragraph IV. of my letter of 1st March 1887.)
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8. You admit that it is in the power of the Postmaster-General to compel steamers leaving England to carry letters to any part of the empire to which they may be going for one penny each or less, but you point out that this power could not be enforced when mails are put on board in a foreign port, as Brindisi or Naples. appear, however, to utterly ignore the demand I have so often made for a cheap mail You service wholly by sea to meet the requirements of those millions of the English people from whose ranks emigrants at the rate of 300,000 or more are drafted annually, and who, on your own showing, received from 100,000 of their relatives in Australia last year, in small money orders of 17. to 10., no less a sum than 346,000l., or nearly 1,000l. a day. You ignore also the facts upon which that demand is based, e.g., that the splendid steamers which run between England and Australia now often make the voyage through the Straits of Gibraltar in quicker time than the mails are contracted to be sent via Brindisi. Why cannot we have two rates of postage, such as existed some years ago, when the rate was 2d. less viâ Southampton than viâ Marseilles? have shown that it might now be 5d. less, with profit to the shipowner and advantage to the public; and I am convinced that if a penny post by fast ships is established, via Plymouth, Liverpool, or Southampton, no long time will pass before penny postage will be general. Without going any further at present, I say that a fast mail service wholly by sea would unquestionably be self-supporting at a penny per letter of not more than half an ounce.
As for Whether
9. You lay great stress upon regularity and speed." There seems to be some natural law requiring that, in order to secure regularity and speed in the transit of mails, at some point a railway train should come in. Peninsular and Oriental steamers start and arrive regularly? The only exception is But do not. the Orient and when they arrive before their time. You are surely aware that there is now a regular service of first class steamers, with fixed days and hours of departure from London, in exact correspondence with the various land services utilized for the conveyance of mails to India, the East, the Cape, and the Southern Hemisphere generally. speed, by all means let us have it and be prepared to pay a fair price for it. the price we pay at present is fair, especially with regard to the transcontinental section, I will not now inquire. But I should not be surprised to hear that those great manufacturers and merchants of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Lowestoft, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, and Belfast, who want regularity and speed for their letters, and who, you say, will not permit these considerations to be sacrificed, learn with astonishment of the way in which the British public are being fleeced, 134. being charged for every single one of the millions of letters passing through France and Italy from England to the East and vice vorsá. I look upon the levying of this tax as a downright swindle, as a violation of the terms of the Postal Union. If France and Italy use our subsidised ships for nothing, why should we not use their trains?
10. I now pass to the subject of subsidies. I am astonished at your acceptance of them as a burden proper to be borne by the Post Office. This is in distinct contradic- tion to the policy of your department from the earliest institution of the packet service (see letter of 25th September 1886, paragraphs 6, 7, 8, and 9). But I am even more
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astonished at your assertion that it really makes no difference what department pays the money. Sir, it makes a very great difference. Wo should know in the first place what we are getting for it, for example, a clear and binding understanding that the subsidised vessel belonged to the Reserve Fleet of the British Navy. That is what we want; that is what we are prepared to pay for and cannot obtain without paying. What we do not want to pay subsidies for, what we can have without subsidies, is ample facility of transit for mails all over the world. You will see that in paying for what we do not want we may miss getting what we do want, and hence the importance of the difference I am pointing out. Besides, there might be a difference of cost. I do not find that the Admiralty subvention to the great British steamers is on anything like the scale of the postal subventions, and it seems quite probable that by shifting the burden of the steamship subsidies from the wrong department to the right we might effect a material reduction.
11. However, you make one important admission, namely, that subsidies may be dispensed with "where the competition of shipowners is sufficiently active," and that you will deal with these cases as they, arise. May I direct your attention to the condition of the Australian shipping trade? You give one case in which the Post Office wanted an increase of only three-quarters of a knot in speed, bui failed to get it. Probably this was the case of a line running to a part of the empire which has no future. My main contention is that the maintenance of a fleet of powerful steamers, able to go faster than the fastest foreign ships afloat, capable of being armed, of covering long distances at great speed, and of keeping the seas for many weeks' stretch at a time, may be a very useful, laudable, and patriotic business, but that it is em- phatically not the business of the Post Office. I repeat that the Post Office should not be saddled with the whole cost of keeping up the character of our merchant fleet, of encouraging the establishment of the fastest and most frequent means of communication between the various parts of the empire, or of maintaining an auxi- liary fleet.
12. The attempt you appear to make to arouse the fears of taxpayers, and to get their help in resisting my proposals, will signally fail, as it deserves to fail. The real taxpayers are the letter writers themselves, from whom you derive a profit of three million sterling per annum. If you reply that this sum is made up of home profits, and that there is a loss on the foreign and Colonial service, as your predecessor did, I shall be found better prepared for you than I was for him. On the American mails alone you make a profit of over 100,000l. per annum, and I venture to assert that my further investigations of your income and expenditure now in progress will show equally large profits in every direction, excepting in the case of India.
13. But the clearest proof of the soundness of my claim that the Post Office should not be saddled with the whole payments to steamers carrying mails, is afforded by your silence in regard to an offer conveyed to you. It was an offer from a powerful foreign company to carry your mails, by swift and punctual steamers to Australia, for less than half the rate you are paying now. Sir, your department is not conducted on strictly commercial principles. No merchant would pay 10s. for what he could pur. chase for 58. Even his patriotism would not stand so severe a test.
14. You at length acknowledge that the German Government carries the letters of its people by sea via Bremerhaven to Australia for 2d. each, though 6d. is charged via Brindisi. And I further elicited from you in Parliament the fact that the cost of conveying a letter from England to the French Colony of New Caledonia viâ Australia is only 4d., while a letter also from England by the very same steamer to Adelaide, South Australia 1,000 miles nearer, and which is reached nearly a week earlier, is charged 6d. Why do we not avail ourselves of these cheaper services which foreign Governments are good enough to provide?
15. But I can point out another way of making a saving sufficient to establish an Imperial penny post. Unfortunately for England, under the Postal Union system, each country keeps its own postage. Last week your letter carriers were engaged in the laborious task of distributing a million of samples of English merchandise and circulars for which the British Post Office was not paid a farthing. The British mer- chants and manufacturers sent these samples in bulk to Belgium to be posted back to England at 1d. each. If they had posted them in England the cost would have been 2d. each from London to any part of the United Kingdom. The consequence was, that as each country keeps its own postage, Belgium alone benefited by the transaction, and England did all the heavy work free-that of delivery. I am informed that the whole of the merchants in one street in London have their letters sent in bulk to France every 0 4
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