[Pg v]

My purpose, in the searches for material which led to the present volume, has been to give as complete an account as it lay in my power to do, of the beginnings and growth of the Canadian post office, with which I was associated for thirty-six years. As my studies progressed, however, I found it would be necessary to widen my field.

The Canadian post office did not come into being as an independent organization. It was but the extension into newly-acquired territories, of a system which had been in operation for nearly three-quarters of a century, with well-established modes of administration. Obviously, either reference should be made to well-known works on the older colonial postal system, or an account of it must be attempted in this volume.

Although careful studies of some aspects of this history have been made, this part of colonial history has, on the whole, received less of the attention of students than has been devoted to throwing light upon other phases of that history; and, what was important for my purpose, little has been done in the way of describing the relations between the colonial postal system and the general post office in London, to which it was subordinate.

The materials for this portion of the history are to be found in the records of the general post office, London, the British Museum, and in the journals of the colonial legislatures. A very interesting document is Franklin's Account Book, which is in the Boston Public Library.

The materials for the history of the post office in the provinces now composing the Dominion of Canada, are in the records of the general post office, the larger portion of which have been transcribed for the Public Archives of Canada; in the correspondence between the colonial governors and the colonial office, which can be found either in the original or in transcripts in the Public Archives, and in the Journals of the Provincial Legislatures.

In the preparation of the chapter on the postal service of Newfoundland, I had the advantage of a rather close acquaintance[Pg vi] with that service, due to my having had charge of it some years ago for a period of several months. The material on which the chapter is founded has been gathered from the records of the general post office, and the legislative papers of the colony.

In collecting my material, I have received ready assistance from all to whom I have applied. To all these my hearty gratitude is tendered. A word of special acknowledgment is due to Mr. Edward Porritt, author of The Unreformed Parliament of Great Britain, who kindly read the manuscript, and to whose experience I am indebted for many valuable suggestions.

William Smith.

August 1920.

[Pg vii]

[Pg ix]

[Pg 1]

Benjamin Franklin relates that when the news reached America in 1763 that peace had been concluded between England and France, he made preparations to visit Canada, for the purpose of extending to it the postal service of the North American colonies, and that the joy bells were still ringing when he left Philadelphia on his journey northward. Franklin has universal fame as a philosopher and statesman, but is perhaps less widely known as one of the deputies of the postmaster general of England. He had, however, a long and useful connection with the post office a quarter of a century before this time. He was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737,[1] and for many years combined the duties of this office with that of newspaper publisher. He became deputy postmaster general in 1753.[2] Canada had been in the hands of the British since 1760, and until a regular system of government was established in 1764, its affairs were administered by a military council, which among other matters provided a rudimentary postal service. The merchants of Quebec were desirous of a regular post office; and, owing to Franklin's promptness, the post office was the first of the institutions of government which was placed on a settled footing after Canada became a British province.

On arriving at Quebec, Franklin opened a post office there with subordinate offices at Three Rivers and Montreal,[3] and established a monthly service between the Canadian post offices and New York, arranging the trips so that the courier should make as close connection as possible with the packet boats which sailed monthly each way between New York and Falmouth, England.

The postal system into which Canada was thus incorporated was of vast extent. It stretched from the river St. Lawrence to Florida. New York was its pivotal point, the mail couriers running[Pg 2] north and south connecting there with one another, and with the packets from England. The system was under the control of two deputies, of equal authority, one of whom was Franklin, and the other John Foxcroft. As this system had a long history when Canada came to be comprised in it, it seems essential to a proper presentation of the subject that a sketch of that history should be furnished.

The first notice of a post office in North America appears in the records of the general court of Massachusetts Bay for the year 1639. The colony was just ten years old. Letters from home, always eagerly looked for, were then awaited with double anxiety in view of the distracted state of England.

King Charles was at this time midway in the course of his great experiment in absolute government, which ten years before had driven these people from their homes, and ten years later was to carry him to the block.

Some effective arrangement for the exchange of correspondence between New and Old England was a necessity. Until 1639 there was none. On the English side, it was the practice for sea captains, who intended making a trip to America, to give public notice of the fact, and to place a bag for the reception of letters in one of the coffee houses. On the day of sailing, the bag was closed and taken on board the vessel to America.

It was at this point that the scheme failed. There was no one in America charged with the duty of receiving and distributing the letters; and consequently, many letters were misdelivered, and many not delivered at all. It was to provide a remedy for this state of things that an ordinance[4] was passed on the 5th of November, 1639.

By this ordinance public notice was given that all letters from beyond the seas were to be taken to the tavern kept by Richard Fairbank, in Boston, who engaged that they should be delivered according to their addresses. He was to receive a penny for every letter he delivered, and was to answer for all miscarriages due to his neglect. The Fairbank's tavern was a resort of some prominence. Through the correspondence of the time, it appears as the meeting place for various committees of the colony, and returns to the surveyor general were ordered to be made at Fairbank's in 1645.

The ordinance of 1639, besides giving directions for the receipt and delivery of letters coming to Boston from beyond the sea,[Pg 3] also authorized Fairbank to provide for the despatch of letters posted at his house, and addressed to places abroad. He was licensed to receive letters from the citizens of Boston for transmission across the sea; but the ordinance laid it down carefully that "no man shall be compelled to bring his letters thither unless he please."

This proviso is quite in keeping with the spirit of the time. At present and for more than two centuries past, the exclusive right of the post office to engage in the conveyance of letters is conceded without question. But at that time, its claims to a monopoly in letter carrying were contested on all sides.

Indeed anything presenting the appearance of a monopoly found small favour. The natural jealousy with which every claim to exclusive privilege is viewed, was heightened to the point of hatred during the struggle for constitutional government, by the fact that trading monopolies which were granted to courtiers, not only enhanced unreasonably the price of many of the necessities of life, but also furnished the means, which enabled the king to pursue his illegal and arbitrary courses in defiance of parliament.

The privy council in England had adopted in 1635 a scheme for the administration of the post office, one of the features of which was the bestowal upon it of the sole right to carry on the business of conveying and delivering letters in England. This was contested in the courts, and in 1646 was pronounced illegal.

The claim had received an earlier blow at the hands of the long parliament, which in 1642 condemned the post office monopoly. The arguments for monopoly, however, were not long to be gainsaid; and when Cromwell took up the question of the post office, and passed a comprehensive act on the subject in 1656, the monopoly as regards the conveyance of letters was conferred on the post office in express terms.

This act was confirmed after the Restoration in 1660; and the post office has remained undisturbed in the enjoyment of its monopoly since that date. In the North American colonies, the post office monopoly was never popular, though, owing to the ease with which it was evaded, it was regarded with indifference until close upon the war of the Revolution.

In 1663, the English government began to see the necessity for a postal service between England and its colonies in America. On the 1st of June of that year, the king wrote to the governor of Barbados[5] that it had become a matter of daily complaint that[Pg 4] there was no safe means of communication with Virginia, New England, Jamaica, Barbados and other colonies in America; and he directed the governor to establish a post office within Barbados and the Caribbee Islands.

The post office was to be under the control of the postmaster general of England, to whom the accounts should be sent; and the rates of postage were to be the same as those fixed for England by the act of 1660. Nothing seems to have been done at this time towards establishing a post office in either Virginia or New England.

So far as the interests and convenience of the people of New England were concerned, these in no way suffered from the lack of attention on the part of the home government. The coffee house on the one side, and the tavern on the other, with the vessels passing between as often as business warranted, answered every reasonable demand.

In Virginia it would not appear that the legislature at this period took any steps towards providing a place of deposit and delivery, such as Fairbank's, for letters passing between the colonists and their correspondents beyond the sea. But the want of this convenience caused little restriction on the exchange of letters by means of the trading vessels which visited Jamestown.

New York contained the only other considerable group of settlers at this time. It was a recent acquisition, having passed into the hands of the English in 1664. The Dutch, the former possessors, had arrangements for the exchange of letters with Amsterdam, not dissimilar from those in force in New England. In 1652 the Dutch West India Company informed their director general in New Amsterdam, that having observed that "private parties give their letters to this or that sailor or free merchant, which letters to their great disadvantage are often lost through neglect, remaining forgotten in the boxes or because one or the other removes to another place," they had a box hung up at their place of meeting in which letters might be deposited for despatch by the first vessel sailing; and they directed that the same step might be taken in New Netherland.[6]

Seven years later, finding that the people of New Netherland persisted in disregarding the measures taken for the safety of their letters, the company repeated their order, and reinforced it by a fine of one hundred Carolus guilders for each infraction.[7]

For some years after 1664, the trade between England and its new possession was of small proportions, and the opportunities[Pg 5] for sending letters from one to the other, few. Lord Cornbury, as late as 1702,[8] informed the Lords of Trade that there were so few vessels running between New York and ports in England that he had to depend for his correspondence on Boston or Philadelphia, which places had regular communication with the mother country.

Nor was the case of New York materially improved in 1708. Cornbury, in that year, pleaded with the board of trade for a regular packet service to some part of the American continent. Sometimes many months elapsed, without his hearing in any way from home. Before he received his last letters in May, he had heard nothing from England for fifteen months.

There were but two safe ways of sending letters to England, which were the Virginia fleet, and the Mast fleet of New England. From Virginia there was no post, and it was very hard to know when that fleet would sail. From Boston there was a post by which Cornbury could hear once a week in summer, and once a fortnight in winter, so that they had a sure conveyance by the Mast fleet. Advantage had to be taken, as opportunity offered, Cornbury informed the board of trade, of the packets running from the West Indies to England, but as several of the packet boats had been captured, this was a very uncertain mode of communication.

But, although the three groups of colonies had each its own connection with England, until 1672 there was no connection whatever between these groups. Nor was any thought to be necessary. The groups were separated from one another not only by space, but by social and political differences.

The Puritans of New England and the Cavaliers of Virginia, had little in common but the memories of a quarrel, which was still warm; and New York was still largely Dutch, though even at that date it was taking on the cosmopolitan character, which has since distinguished it.

As for the trade of the colonies, Mr. Woodrow Wilson stated—"the main lines of trade run straight to the mother country, and were protected when there was need by English fleets. Both the laws of parliament and their own interest bound the trade of the colonies to England. The Navigation Act of 1660 forbade all trade with the colonies except in English bottoms; forbade also, the shipment of tobacco any whither but to England itself; and an act of 1663 forbade the importation of anything at all except out of England, which it was then once for all determined must[Pg 6] be the entrepôt and place of staple for all foreign trade. It was the Dutch against whom these acts were aimed."[9]

As has happened so often, however, that which could not be accomplished by reason of the feebleness of the common interest was brought about by the presence of impending danger. In 1672, war broke out between the English and the Dutch, the object of which was maritime supremacy and colonial expansion. The stakes were the colonies in Africa, the East Indies, the West Indies and America.

The English having ousted their rivals from New York presented a strong front on the North American continent; and the only thing lacking was cohesion among the several colonies. At the outbreak of the war, the king directed governor Lovelace, of New York, to see what could be done towards establishing a regular postal communication between the colonies.

Lovelace arranged for a monthly service by courier between New York and Boston.[10] There was no road between the two places; and governor Winthrop was asked to provide an expert woodman, who would guide the courier by the easiest road.

The courier was directed to blaze the route, and it was hoped that a good road might be made along the route pursued. The courier made his trips for a few months only, when New York was captured by a Dutch fleet which came suddenly upon it. The town was restored to the English at the conclusion of the war in 1674, and with the disappearance of the danger, the communication also was dropped.

A few years later danger of a more serious character threatened from another quarter, and again the colonies were compelled to recognize the necessity of yielding something from the attitude of jealous independence, which characterized them. Between the English colonies and the French in Canada there was a steady rivalry for the possession of the fur trade of the Western country. Each had Indian allies, whose methods of warfare carried terror among their opponents.

The English were in numbers very much superior to the French; and if united and determined could have overwhelmed them. The unwillingness of the English to take any action in common was costing them dearly, as the outlying parts of all the colonies were being constantly harassed by the Indian tribes in league with the French.[Pg 7]

In 1684 a conference took place at Albany between the representatives of the several colonies and of the Iroquois nations. This conference was important in several respects, but particularly in the fact that it was the first in which all the colonies took part. Even remote Virginia sent a delegate.

While the colonies were in this mind, Colonel Dongan, governor of New York, determined to make an effort to establish a permanent postal service among them. His plan was to establish a line of post houses along the coast from the French boundaries to Virginia. The king, who was much pleased with the proposition, directed Dongan to farm out the undertaking to some enterprising contractor, for a period of three or five years, and to turn over at least one-tenth of the profits to the Duke of York.[11]

The duke appears to have had a claim on the revenues of the post office on two grounds. He was proprietor of the colony of New York; and under the post office act of 1660, he was recognized as entitled to a share in the profits from the English post office.

How far Dongan succeeded with this extensive scheme does not appear. He planned to visit Connecticut, Boston, and, if possible, Pemaquid. In March 1685, he had an ordinance adopted in the council of New York for a post office throughout the colonies, and fixed the charges for the conveyance of letters at threepence for each hundred miles they were carried, and for the hire of horses for riding post, threepence a mile.

Dongan's jurisdiction did not, however, extend beyond the colony of New York; and the records of the other colonies are silent as to their acquiescence in this arrangement. The only evidence that has appeared as to the operation of the service, and it establishes the fact that the service was performed for a time at least, is that Leisler, an insurrectionary leader, who seized the government of the colony in 1689, arrested the mail carrier on his way from New York to Boston, and confiscated his letters.[12]

In July 1683, a weekly post was established in Pennsylvania. Letters were carried from Philadelphia to the Falls of Delaware for threepence; to Chester for twopence; to New Castle for fourpence; and to Maryland for sixpence.[13]

As part of the scheme of James II for the confederation of the New England States under a royal governor, a postmaster was appointed for the united colonies. The choice fell upon Edward[Pg 8] Randolph, who had just previously been made secretary and registrar of the new province. The appointment was dated 23rd of November, 1685.[14] He seems to have discharged the duties of postmaster[15] until the fall of the Andros government, which followed closely the deposition of James II in 1689.

Until this time, then, the post office would be classed generally among the merely temporary conveniences of the state, and not among its permanent institutions. When William III was settled on his throne, he managed, amid his cares at home and abroad, to give some attention to the affairs of the colonies. Those in North America had been growing rapidly, and at the end of the period of the revolution in England, the population is believed to have been about 200,000.

The greater part of the increase was in the middle states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; though in the south, the colonies of Maryland and Virginia showed considerable gain, and a beginning was made in the settlement of the Carolinas.

The question of providing the American colonies with a postal system was submitted to the king by Thomas Neale, Master of the Mint, who coupled his representations on the subject with a petition for authority to establish such a system in America at his own charges. He pointed out in his memorial that there had never been a post for the conveying of letters within or between Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New York, New England, East and West Jersey, Pennsylvania, and northward as far as the king's dominions reach in America; and that the want thereof had been a great hindrance to the trade of those parts.

The king thereupon, on the 17th of February, 1691, granted a patent to Neale, conferring upon him authority to set up one or more post offices in each of the chief ports of the several islands, plantations and colonies in America, and to carry on all the functions of postmaster, either in person or by deputy. He might collect as his own, the postage accruing from the business, the rates being fixed by the English post office act of 1660; or he was at liberty to charge such other rates "as the planters and others will freely agree to give for their letters or packets upon the first settlement of such office or offices."

In order to secure to Neale a monopoly of the postal business, the patent imposed a prohibition on any person except Neale[Pg 9] from setting up post offices during the term of the patent, which was twenty-one years. Neale was held bound to provide an efficient service; in case of dissatisfaction, or of his failure to put the service in operation within two years, the patent was to become invalid. The consideration that Neale was to give for the patent was merely nominal; he was to remit six shillings and eightpence to the exchequer each year at the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel.

Having secured his patent, Neale sought a suitable person to act as his deputy. His choice fell upon Andrew Hamilton, an Edinburgh merchant, who after seven years' residence in New Jersey, was made governor of that province in 1692. Hamilton was a man of energy and ability; and in the difficult task of conciliating sensitive legislatures, and bringing them into agreement with his views, he had much success. It was to him that the colonies were indebted for their first effective postal system.

Neale's patent did not give him power to set up a postal service, and fix his charges without regard to the will of the people. He might either apply the rates fixed by the act of 1660; or come to terms with the people or their representatives as to the rates they would agree to pay. The latter was the alternative chosen.

Accordingly, during the year 1693, Hamilton addressed himself to the several colonial governments, setting forth his plan, and begging that they might "ascertain and establish such rates and terms as should tend to quicker maintenance of mutual correspondence among the neighbouring colonies and plantations, and that trade and commerce might be better preserved."

The colonies having responded favourably to his overtures, Hamilton prepared a draft bill, which he submitted to the legislatures for their acceptance. This bill provided for a general post office or chief letter office in the principal town of each colony, the postmaster of which was to be appointed by Hamilton. The monopoly conferred on Neale by his patent was enforced in the proposed bill by considerable penalties for infringements.

The postal charges, as well as the privileges and appurtenances to be granted to post masters and mail couriers, were discussed between Hamilton and the several legislatures. There was some variety in the privileges allowed to postmasters and couriers. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, the mail couriers were granted free ferriage over the rivers and other water courses which lay along their routes. In the acts passed by New York and New Hampshire, there was no mention of free ferries, but in each of these acts a rather peculiar exemption is made in favour[Pg 10] of the postmasters, that they should not be subject to excise charges on the ale and other liquors which formed the stock in trade of their business as innkeepers.

The postmasters in all the colonies were made exempt from all public services, such as keeping watch and ward, and sitting on juries. Shipmasters on arriving at a port with letters in their care were enjoined to deliver them to the nearest post office, where they would receive one halfpenny for each letter.[16]

The principal postal rates, as settled between Hamilton and the legislatures concerned were as follows: on letters from Europe or from any country beyond sea, if for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania twopence; if for New York ninepence. In the interchange among the colonies themselves, the charge on a letter passing between Boston and Philadelphia was fifteen pence, and between New York and Philadelphia fourpence-halfpenny.

There was a peculiarity in the postage on letters passing between Boston and New York. It differed according to the direction the letter was conveyed. A letter from New York to Boston cost twelvepence; while ninepence was the charge from Boston to New York. This is one of the consequences of the separate negotiations carried on by Hamilton with the different legislatures.

The Massachusetts act fixed the charge on the letters for delivery in Boston; and the New York act on the letters for New York. From Virginia, to Philadelphia, New York and Boston, the charges were ninepence, twelvepence and two shillings respectively. All the acts concurred in the stipulation that letters on public business should be carried free of charge.

The foregoing contains the substance of the acts passed by New York and Pennsylvania. Massachusetts went a step further. To that legislature it appeared desirable to put a binding clause requiring Hamilton to give a satisfactory service. Massachusetts was as willing as the others to grant a monopoly of letter carrying to Hamilton, but it was of opinion that the exclusive privilege should carry an obligation with it. The postal service was being established as a public convenience; and if Hamilton was to have the power to prevent any person else from providing the convenience, he should be bound to meet the public requirements himself.[Pg 11]

The Massachusetts legislature, after authorizing Hamilton to settle a post office in Boston, fixing the postal charges, and conferring a monopoly on him, accordingly added a clause binding Hamilton to maintain constant posts for the carriage of letters to the several places mentioned in the act; to deliver the letters faithfully and seasonably; and it imposed a fine of £5 for each omission.

In order that the public might be in a position to detect any delays in the delivery of letters after they reached a post office, the postmaster was required to mark on each letter the date on which it was received at his office. New Hampshire followed Massachusetts in adding this clause to its post office acts.

The four acts were sent to London, and laid before the king in council, as all colonial acts were. The acts of New York, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire passed council and became law. On the advice of the governors of the post office, the Massachusetts act was disallowed.[17]

The grounds for the discrimination against Massachusetts are difficult to understand. The Massachusetts act undoubtedly contained departures from the terms of the patent. But they were such departures as might be expected when an act is drawn up, by a person unlearned in the law, who, having the patent before him, aims at substantial rather than at literal conformity therewith. There can be no question that the drafts presented to the several assemblies were prepared by one person. Their practical identity establishes the fact.

There can be equally little doubt that the draftsman was Hamilton himself. The governors of the post office, who framed the objections,[18] noted first that the patent provided that the appointment of Neale's deputy should, at his request, be made by the postmaster general; whereas the Massachusetts act appeared to appoint Andrew Hamilton postmaster general of the colonies, independently of the postmaster general of England, and not subject to the patent.

The patent required Neale to furnish accounts at stated intervals to enable the treasury to establish the profits from the enterprize. It also stipulated for the cancellation of the patent in certain eventualities. Both these terms are omitted from the act. Insufficient care was taken in safeguarding the post office revenue,[Pg 12] and no provision was made for a successor in case of the removal of Hamilton from his position.

The points to which the post office drew attention were, as will be seen, far from wanting weight; and if they had not been pressed against the Massachusetts bill alone, would have excited little comment. But the Massachusetts general court noted and resented the discrimination. When Neale was informed of the disallowance, he begged the governors of the post office to prepare a bill which they would regard as free from objections, and to lend their efforts to have it accepted by Massachusetts.[19]

A bill was drawn up; and Lord Bellomont, the governor of New England, was instructed to invite the favourable consideration of the Massachusetts legislature to it.[20] The bill was laid before the general court on June 3, 1699, and it was ordered to be transcribed and read.[21]

Five days later it came up for consideration, but it was resolved that the committee on the bill should "sit this afternoon,"[22] and it appeared in the assembly no more. The rejection of the bill, however, was of little or no practical consequence. The post office was too great a convenience to be refused; and so it was established and conducted as if the bill were in operation, except that it had no monopoly in that colony.

But the legislature, which was evidently desirous of extending in its own way all reasonable aid to Hamilton, passed an order in 1703[23] requiring shipmasters to deliver all letters they brought with them from oversea at the post office of the place of their arrival, for which they were to receive a halfpenny each from the postmaster. Massachusetts equally with the other colonies made an annual grant to the post office for the conveyance of its public letters.

So far the narrative deals only with the northern colonies. The proposition for a post office, however, was submitted to Virginia and Maryland as well. It would seem, however, that the mode of approaching these governments differed from that taken in laying the proposition before the northern colonies. In case of the northern colonies Hamilton dealt with the legislatures in person. The draft bill which he prepared was submitted as a basis for discussion. So far as it went it was accepted, and Hamilton agreed to such additions as the legislatures considered necessary in view of local circumstances.[Pg 13]

Virginia and Maryland were approached quite differently. They were advised of the scheme not by Hamilton, but by the English court. In the minutes of council of both governments,[24] it is recorded that the proposition was laid before them in a letter from the queen. This fact will account for the very different consideration the proposition received from these colonies. Maryland rejected it outright. On the 13th of May, 1695, the scheme was laid before the house of burgesses. It was set aside,[25] and nothing more was heard of it.

Virginia gave attentive consideration to the proposition to establish a post office, though the ultimate results were no greater than in Maryland. There had been since 1658 an arrangement for the transmission of letters concerning the public affairs of the colony.[26] An order was issued by the council that all letters superscribed for the public service should be immediately conveyed from plantation to plantation to the place and person directed, and that any delay should subject the person at fault to a fine of one hogshead of tobacco.

No arrangements of a systematic nature were made for the conveyance of private letters. When information of the patent granted to Neale reached Virginia, the colony showed immediate interest. The council on the 12th of January, 1693, appointed Peter Heyman deputy postmaster,[27] and proceeded to draw up a post office bill. This bill, which became law on the 3rd of April 1693,[28] authorized Neale to establish a postal system in the colony, at his own expense.

The conditions were that he was to set up a general post office at some convenient place, and settle one or more sub-post offices in each county. As letters were posted in the colony or reached it from abroad, they were to be forthwith dispersed, carried and delivered in accordance with the directions they bore, and all letters for England were to be despatched by the first ship bound for any part of that country.

The rates of postage were to be threepence a single letter within an eighty mile radius; fourpence-half penny for single letters outside[Pg 14] the eighty mile radius; and eighteen pence for each ounce weight. Public letters were to pass free of postage. No provision was made for postage on letters addressed to places beyond the boundaries of the colony; and it was expressly stipulated that the act did not confer a monopoly on Neale. Merchants were not restrained by this act from employing the services of shipmasters and others, to carry their letters abroad.

The Virginia act of 1693 was local in its scope and provincial in its character. There is a certain simplicity in the extent of its demands as compared with the paucity of its concessions. Neale, at his own cost, was to establish a postal system, comprising a general post office at a place agreed upon, and one or more subordinate offices in each county. Couriers were to be available to take letters anywhere within the colony—without postage if on public business, at rates fixed by the colony if they were private letters. But no person need employ the post office, should any other more convenient or cheaper mode of conveyance offer itself.

A post office, like other kindred accommodations, creates business for itself; but Virginia did not intend that Neale should have any assurance of the business he had brought into existence. As soon as it reached a point at which it was worth struggling for, a competitor might step in and deprive Neale of the fruits of his enterprise.

The act of 1693 seems to have been adopted before the colonies were made aware of Hamilton's connection with the American post office. When the council of Virginia were advised of Hamilton's appointment, they opened communication with him. The notes of the correspondence as they appear in the minutes of council[29] do not give much information, but they show that Hamilton's proposition when submitted to council was not found acceptable; and as subsequent communications failed to remove the difficulties, matters remained as they were until after the Neale patent had expired.

In 1710, the subject was reopened, and the governor reported to the board of trade, that for two months past he had been expecting Hamilton to visit Virginia, for the purpose of opening a post office, and connecting it with the other colonies. The governor believed that the scheme was feasible, and would do his utmost[Pg 15] to encourage it. He foresaw a difficulty in the lack of small currency, tobacco which was the only specie, being in the governor's words "very incommodious to receive small payments in, and of very uncertain value."[30]

The line of posts established by Hamilton extended from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Philadelphia. Over this long line, couriers travelled with the mails weekly each way.[31] The volume of correspondence carried cannot be ascertained, as the great mass of it, being on public business, would be free of postage. But the postage collected throughout North America during the first four years, from 1693 to 1697, was only £1456 18s. 3d., an average receipt of considerably less than £400 a year.

By way of comparison it may be noted that, in 1693, the revenue between London and Edinburgh was £500; and it was explained that nearly the whole of that amount was for government despatches. The expenses of the Portsmouth-Philadelphia service during those years were £3817 6s. 11d.[32] The deficit of £2360 8s. 8d. fell upon Neale. Results such as these would be sufficiently discouraging. But Neale and his deputy, Hamilton, were hopeful, and drew comfort from the fact that the revenue of New York which was quite insignificant the first year had doubled itself in the third year.

At the end of the sixth year, the revenue had increased to the point at which all the expenses were met, except Hamilton's salary.[33] In 1699, Hamilton went to England, and joined Neale in an appeal to the treasury.[34] After pointing out the benefits accruing to the colonies from the post office—the increase in the transatlantic and intercolonial trade, the rapid diffusion of intelligence in time of war, and the facilities afforded for the delivery of public letters—they declared that unless steps were taken to secure to them the transmission of the whole, and not a mere portion of the oversea correspondence, they might be compelled to abandon the undertaking.

The plan Neale and Hamilton proposed to this end, was to put a stop to the collection of letters at the English coffee houses, and to compel the shipmasters to take all their letters from the local post office, where they would be made up in sealed bags.

Besides ensuring to Neale, by this means, the postage on all[Pg 16] the correspondence passing between the mother country and the colonies, the measure proposed would prevent certain abuses which were incident to the existing arrangement. Where the bag hung open in a coffee house, any person might examine its contents on the pretext that he wanted to get his own letter back, and when the ship had reached its destination it was the practice of some captains to delay the delivery of the letters in their hands until they are ready to sail again, and then they got rid of their letters in any way they could.

If the mails were made up in post offices, and the captains were compelled by law to deliver them to the post office at the port of destination before they broke bulk, these evils would be corrected, and a large revenue now lost to the post office would be saved.

Neale and Hamilton also submitted a revised tariff of postal charges, in which there was a general increase. The postmasters general in England rather deprecated the increased postal rates, stating that experience had taught them that low rates were found to be more productive of revenue than those which placed the post office beyond the reach of the mass of the people. They approved of the suggestion that post offices should be established in England for the handling of oversea mails, and hoped that a few years of good management would make the service a remunerative one.

At this point the postmasters general in London threw out a suggestion, which was worth discussion. They doubted whether a post office in private hands would ever commend itself to the colonies in the same way as if it were directly in the hands of the king. The post office depended for its prosperity on the maintenance of its monopoly, a thing naturally distasteful. The monopoly was easily evaded, even if the colonial governments supported it heartily, but any lack of inclination on their part would leave it valueless. They were of opinion that it would require all the authority possessed by the king to induce the colonial governments to co-operate with the heads of the post office in the efforts of the latter to put the service on a sound footing.

Neale, who was sinking deeper and deeper into debt, seized on this expression of opinion, and offered to surrender his patent at any time, on such consideration as seemed just. The treasury, however, were not yet ready to take over the American posts, but they directed the postmasters general to give Hamilton every assistance in their power, and requested the governors of the colonies to do the same, adding that when the value of the post office could[Pg 17] be ascertained, they would give the question of the resumption of the patent, further consideration.

Neale's indebtedness to Hamilton for salary now amounting to £1100, he assigned his patent to Hamilton, and to one Robert West, who had made some advances to Neale some years before. The new patentees besought the government to extend their term, which in ordinary course would expire in 1712. Their confidence in the eventual success of the scheme, however, suggested to the postmasters general that the time was now ripe for the crown to take back the patent, and manage the postal service through the general post office in England.

The transfer was made; and John Hamilton,[35] son of the founder of the American post office, who died in 1703, was entrusted with the management of the service, as the deputy of the postmaster general. The results were no better than when the service was privately administered. In 1709, there was a yearly deficit of £200; and as the queen would not allow her losses on this head to be augmented, the postmasters were not being paid.[36]

The postmaster of New England made a strong representation to the government of Massachusetts, pointing out that he had received nothing from the government since 1706, although he had saved the colony £150 a year by the delivery of the public letters. The remonstrance was fruitless, and he renewed his application in 1711. The legislative council on each occasion was prepared to pay what was due to the postmaster, but the assembly could not be brought to authorize it.

[Pg 18]

For some years various circumstances had been arising which made it necessary that the post office in Great Britain and the colonies should be established on a footing different from that on which it then stood. The legislative union between England and Scotland in 1707 called for a uniform postal service throughout Britain; but without additional legislation the postmaster general of England could not dispose of the revenues of the post office in Scotland.

The colonies were in their infancy when the English law of 1660 was enacted, and they were not mentioned in it at all. The only clause in that act which affected the colonies in any way was that which required all masters of ships who brought letters with them from beyond the seas, to deposit them at the nearest post office. There was no penalty attached to the disregard of this clause, and the attempt to induce the shipmasters to obey the law by paying them a penny for every letter they delivered in the English post office was pronounced by the auditors to be illegal, and there was a threat made that these payments would be disallowed in the accounts.

There were a number of other circumstances arising out of the growth of the kingdom and its colonial expansion, which compelled the postmaster general to take action in advance of legal authority. When the treasury, after the union of England and Scotland, learned that a new post office law was necessary, they determined to take advantage of the fact to serve their own purposes. The war of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1702, while ruinous to France, also seriously crippled England; and the treasury saw that the enactment of a new post office act might be utilized to increase the postal charges, and additional sums raised for carrying on and finishing the war.

In 1710, accordingly, a post office bill was presented to parliament.[37] It was passed by parliament; and this act was the first[Pg 19] measure which dealt in a comprehensive way with the British post office. Substantially it was the law of the post office for more than a century afterwards.

The effect of the new law on the colonial post office was profound. Until 1710 the terms and conditions under which the post office in the colonies was operated, were matters of arrangement between Hamilton and the several legislatures. While the Neale patent enabled Hamilton to set up post offices in the colonies, the postal charges were fixed by the colonial legislatures at such rates as "the planters shall agree to give."

The Neale patent had been resumed by the crown in 1706, but not abrogated. Hence, until the new act came into force, the crown simply stood in the place of the patentees, and operated under the legislation agreed upon between Hamilton and the colonial governments. New York and Pennsylvania, as their short term acts expired, renewed them with the crown; and New Jersey, which established a postal system in 1709, fixed the rates of postage by act of the legislature, but placed the management of the service in the hands of the postmaster general.

The post office act of 1710 made it no longer necessary to consult the colonial legislatures as to the charges to be made for the conveyance and delivery of letters in North America. The supreme control of the postal system throughout the British dominions, beyond the sea, as well as at home, was vested in the postmaster general of England. The rates of payment were fixed by the act, and the mode in which the surplus revenues were to be disposed of was set forth in the same enactment.

In America, the general post offices at Boston, New York and Philadelphia, which stood quite independent of one another, were reduced to the rank of ordinary offices, and made parts of the system, the headquarters of which were placed by the act in New York.[38] The administration of the system, as reconstructed, was continued in the hands of John Hamilton.

As in all other parts of the British dominions, the rates of postage were sensibly increased.[39] Under the Neale patent, a letter from New York for Philadelphia cost fourpence-halfpenny. The[Pg 20] act of Queen Anne raised the charge to ninepence, just double the former rate. A letter posted in Boston, and addressed to Philadelphia, which under the Neale patent cost for postage fifteen pence, cost twenty-one pence under the act of 1710. But these figures give no adequate idea of the magnitude of the postal charges as fixed by the act of Queen Anne.

An explanation of the system to which these rates applied will make the matter clearer. At the present time the postage on a letter passing anywhere within the British Empire, or from Canada to any part of the United States or Mexico, is two cents per ounce weight, whether the letter is addressed to the next town or to the farthermost post office in the Yukon.

In 1710, and indeed in Canada until 1851, the distance a letter was carried was an element which entered into the cost. It would have been thought no more proper to ignore the element of distance in fixing the postage on a letter than in fixing the charge for the conveyance of a parcel of goods. By the act of 1710 the postage on a single letter passing between two places sixty miles apart or less was fourpence; where the places were from sixty miles to one hundred miles apart the charge was sixpence.

Besides the distance, however, there was another factor which helped to determine the amount of the postage. This factor will appear from a description of the classes into which letters were divided.

Letters were single, double, and treble, and ounce. A single letter was one consisting of one sheet or piece of paper, weighing less than one ounce. If with this single sheet letter, a piece of paper was enclosed, no matter how small, the letter was called a double letter. The treble letter was a letter consisting of more than two sheets or pieces of paper, under the weight of an ounce.

Whatever the postage of a single letter might be, the postage on a double letter was equal to that of two such single letters; and that on a treble letter was three times that on a single letter. There were no envelopes in use at this period, and the sheet on which the letter was written was so folded that an unwritten portion came on the outside, and on this space the address was written.

The question will occur as to how the presence of enclosures could be detected among the folds of the larger single sheet. There were several means of detection born of ingenuity and experience. The approved method and the one long in service, was to hold[Pg 21] every letter up to a lighted candle, and by some skilful manipulating, the taxable enclosures could be seen.

But it was not only enclosures to which the attention of the officials was directed. The postal charges were found so oppressive that several merchants who had letters to send to the same town used to write their several communications on the same sheet, which on reaching the person addressed was by him passed on to the others, whose letters were on the same sheet.

In the post office the practice was much condemned. As it was not specifically provided against in the act, it had to be tolerated until the act was amended; and thereafter when several letters were written on one paper, each was to be charged as a distinct letter. The letter inspectors then had to satisfy themselves that there was no more than one person's handwriting in the sheet, which was, of course, carefully sealed with wax.

The ounce letter needs no explanation. At present the ounce is the unit of weight for letters sent from Canada to every part of the civilized world. In this aspect it corresponds with the single letter of the pre-penny postage days. But the ounce letter of 1710 and of over a century afterwards was far removed from the single letter in the matter of postage.

In that respect the ounce letter was equal to four single letters, and was charged four times the rate of the single letter. Thus, while a single sheet weighing less than an ounce could pass between two neighbouring towns not over sixty miles apart for fourpence, if it tipped the ounce weight it was chargeable with sixteen pence.

The act of 1710 offered a problem to the paper makers. A sheet of paper had to be made stout enough to stand the handling of the post office without the protection of an envelope, and be yet so light as to allow the largest space possible within the ounce weight.

Under this system, in which distance, number of enclosures and weight were all factors, the charges for letters, such as are posted by thousands in our larger offices every day, were very high. An ounce letter, which at the present time costs but two cents to convey to the remotest post office in the North West of Canada, or to Southern Mexico, in 1710 cost three shillings to carry from New York to Philadelphia. From New York to Boston, the postage on the same letter was four shillings. Between the outermost points of the North American postal system in 1710—Portsmouth, N.H., and Charlestown, N.C.—the postage for an ounce letter was ten shillings.[Pg 22]

The act of Queen Anne's reign, so long the charter of the British postal system, also greatly increased the charges on letters passing between the mother country and the colonies. In place of the penny or twopence which satisfied the captains for the delivery in America of the letters which had been placed in the letter bags hung up in the London coffee houses, the postage on a single letter passing from London to New York became one shilling. If the letter weighed an ounce, the charge was four shillings.

Captains of vessels, moreover, were no longer at liberty to disregard the requirements of the post office that they should deliver their letters at the post office of the port of arrival. If they failed, they laid themselves open to a ruinous fine.

Remembering the resentment with which half a century later the Americans greeted every scheme, which could be construed into imposing a tax without their consent, one wonders how the post office act of 1710 was regarded in the colonies.

The question is interesting enough to warrant some inquiry. The legislative records have been searched carefully, and also, so far as they were available, the newspapers of the period. With one exception about to be mentioned, the only reference to the post office act which has been discovered is in the New Hampshire records. There it is stated that the act was read before the council on the 13th of September, 1711, and afterwards proclaimed by beat of drum in the presence of the council and of some members of the house of representatives.

The case in which the act came into question occurred in Virginia. This colony had no post office in 1710, nor for a considerable period afterwards; and it was the attempt to put the post office in operation in 1717 which led to the protest and the countervailing action.

Virginia seems to have had no desire to be included in the American postal system. In 1699 Hamilton reported on the proposition of extending the system southward to Virginia.[40] The extension would cost £500; and Hamilton declared that the desire for communicating with the northern colonies was so slight that he did not believe there would be one hundred letters a year exchanged between Virginia and Maryland and the other colonies. Practically all the correspondence of the two colonies was with Great Britain and other countries in Europe.

In the autumn of 1717, steps were taken to establish a post office in the two colonies, and to connect them with the other[Pg 23] colonies. Postmasters were appointed in each colony. Couriers carried the mails into several of the more populous counties; and a fortnightly service was established between Williamsburg and Philadelphia. This was quite satisfactory, until the people began to read the placards which they observed affixed to every post office wall, directing that all letters, not expressly excepted by the act of parliament, should be delivered to the local postmasters. Here was matter for thought.

A glance at the tariff showed that the charge made by the post office on a letter from England was one shilling for a single letter. The letters from England were the only letters the people of Virginia cared anything about, and they were accustomed to pay only a penny as postage for them.

There was some little trouble, and perhaps a slight risk attending the safe delivery of letters by the existing arrangement. Virginians were, however, used to it, and had no great fault to find. It might be that if they could have received their letters at the post office for the same charge as they paid for receiving them direct from the ship captains, they would have preferred going to the post office.

But the difference in convenience between the two places of receipt was not worth the difference between one penny and one shilling; and indeed it looked uncommonly as if the government were using this means to tax them elevenpence on every letter they received.

The people, on realizing the condition of things, made a great clamour.[41] Parliament, they declared, could levy no tax on them but with the consent of the assembly; and besides that, their letters were all exempted from the monopoly of the postmaster general because they nearly all, in some way or other, related to trade.

The Virginians were putting an unwarrantably broad interpretation on an exemption, which appears in all post office acts, in favour of letters relating to goods which the letters accompany on the vessel. It has always been the practice to allow shipmasters, carrying a consignment of goods, to deliver the invoice to the consignee with the goods, in order that the transaction might be completed with convenience.

It would not be practicable, however, to confine this exemption to invoices accompanying goods, as this would require a knowledge of the contents of letters, which could not be obtained[Pg 24] without an intolerable inquisition. Consequently, it has been customary to allow all letters accompanying consignments of goods to be delivered with the goods, without asking whether they relate to the goods or not. But the scope of the exemption is clearly defined, and has never been allowed to include ordinary business letters, not accompanied by goods.

The Virginians, however, were not content to leave their case to the precarious chances of a legal or constitutional argument. They set about neutralizing the post office act by an effective counter measure. A bill was submitted to the legislature which, while it acknowledged the authority of the post office act, imposed on postmasters giving effect to it certain conditions which it was impossible to fulfil, and attached extravagant penalties for the infraction of those conditions. The postmasters were to be fined £5 for every letter which they demanded from aboard a ship—letters of a character which the British statute exempted from the postmaster general's exclusive privilege.

Now every ship's letter bag would contain probably many letters relating to goods aboard the ship, as well as many which were in no way so related. But how was the postmaster to tell the letters accompanying goods from those which did not? Even if the ship's captain assisted to the best of his ability, which was more than doubtful, there would be many letters about which the postmaster could not be certain, and with a £5 penalty for every mistake, his position was not an enviable one.

Another clause in the bill of the legislature of Virginia contained a schedule of hours for every courier. The terms of the schedule were so exacting that compliance with it was impossible. The penalty attached to every failure to observe the hours set forth, was twenty shillings for each letter delayed.[42] As the governor pointed out, the difficulties of travel during the winter season, owing to the number of great rivers to be passed, would subject the postmasters to the risk of a fine for every letter they accepted for transmission at that period of the year.

The bill of 1718, when sent up for the governor's assent, was promptly vetoed; but on the other hand, the intention of the deputy postmaster general to establish a post office in Virginia was not pressed. It was not until 1732, when the governor had relinquished his office, and had himself been appointed deputy postmaster general, that Virginia was included in the postal system of North America.[Pg 25]

Even after that date the post office in Virginia was on a somewhat irregular footing, at least in regard to the conveyance of the mails. In a gazetteer published in 1749,[43] it is stated that while regular trips are made by mail courier from Portsmouth to Philadelphia, southward to Williamsburg the courier's movements were uncertain, as he did not set out until there were sufficient letters posted for the south, to guarantee his wages from the postage on them. There was a post office at this period as far south as Charlestown, but the post carriage for that office was still more uncertain.

With the exception of the Virginian contretemps, the period from 1710 until after the middle of the eighteenth century was one of quiescence. Deputy postmaster general succeeded deputy postmaster general; and the annals of their administrations carry little that is interesting. After the retirement of Hamilton in 1721, a change was made in the relations between the deputy postmaster general and the general post office, by which the post office in London was relieved of all expense in connection with the maintenance of the North American postal system.

Hamilton had a salary of £200 a year. But the profits from the post office did not quite cover that amount, as on his withdrawal, there was due to him £355 arrears of salary. In recommending the claim to the treasury, the postmaster general stated that the post office in America had been put on such a footing that if it produced no profit, it would no longer be a charge on the revenue.[44]

The facilities given to the public were not increased during that period. Indeed, in 1714, they were diminished, as the courier's trips between Boston and Philadelphia, which in 1693 were performed weekly throughout the year, were reduced to fortnightly during the winter months, and they remained at that frequency until 1753.

It is obvious that the post office was not used by the public any more than was absolutely necessary, and that every means was taken to evade the regulations designed to preserve the postmaster general's monopoly. Thomas Hancock, in a letter written in 1740, to Governor Talcott of Connecticut, told him that he saved the colony from forty shillings to three pounds every year, through the interest he had with the captains of the London ships, who delivered the letters to him instead of handing them over to the post office.[45][Pg 26]

The line of undistinguished representatives of the British post office in America came to an end in 1753, when Benjamin Franklin was made deputy postmaster general, jointly with William Hunter of Virginia.

Franklin, besides being a man of eminent practical ability, brought to his task a large experience in post office affairs. He had been postmaster of Philadelphia for fifteen years prior to his appointment to the deputyship; and for some time before had acted as post office controller, his duty being to visit and instruct the postmasters throughout the country.

At the time Franklin and Hunter entered upon their office they found little to encourage them. The couriers who conveyed the mails were much slower than most other travellers on the same roads. It took six weeks to make the trip from Philadelphia to Boston and back, and during the three winter months, the trips were made only once a fortnight.

The new deputies so reorganized the service that the trips were made weekly throughout the year, and they shortened the time by one-half; and many other improvements were made.[46] For a time the expenditure of the post office largely outran the revenue. But the usual rewards of additional facilities to the public followed.

In 1757, when the outlay had reached its highest point, and the public response to the increased facilities was still but feeble, the post office was over £900 in debt to the deputy postmasters general. Three years later this debt was entirely cleared off, and the operations showed a surplus of £278. In 1761 the surplus reached the amount of £494, and this sum was transmitted to the general post office in London.

The receipt of this first remittance was the occasion of much satisfaction to the postmasters general. For a generation the post office in America had been nearly forgotten. Since 1721, it had cost the home office nothing for its maintenance, and for long before that time it had yielded nothing to the treasury, and so it had been allowed to plod along unregarded.

A remittance from this source was quite unexpected, and one can imagine the pleasure with which the entry was made in the treasury book, and the words added "this is the first remittance ever made of its kind."[47] But though the first, it was by no means[Pg 27] the last; for until Franklin's dismissal in 1774, a remittance from the American post office was an annual occurrence. Franklin declared that, at the time of his dismissal, the American office yielded a revenue three times that from Ireland.[48]

The success of the post office under Franklin's regime suggests the question, as to the share Franklin had in that success. During the whole course of his administration, he had with him an associate deputy postmaster general, William Hunter, from 1753 until 1761, and John Foxcroft, from 1761 until his connection with the post office ceased.

Little is known of the capacity of either of these officials; of Hunter, practically nothing. Foxcroft was certainly a man of intelligence, but nothing is known to warrant the belief that he possessed unusual qualities. That the routine of post office management was left in the hands of the associates, may be inferred not so much from the multifarious character of Franklin's activities, for he seems to have been equal to any demands made upon him, as from the fact that out of the twenty-one years of his administration, fifteen years were spent in England as the representative of the province of Pennsylvania in its negotiations with the home government.

That Franklin's occupations in England did not absorb all his time is amply proven by his voluminous correspondence which shows him to have been engaged in abstruse speculations in science, and in economic and philosophic studies. But to administer an institution like the post office one must be on the spot, and the Atlantic ocean lay between him and his work from May 1757, until November 1762, and from November 1764, until his dismissal in 1774. Franklin was in America while the measures were taken which put the post office on an efficient footing, and again in 1763, when the treaty of Paris confirmed England in her possession of Canada.

Franklin's contribution to the North American post office consisted mainly, it would seem, in certain important ideas, the application of which turned a half century of failure into an immediate success. It is a commonplace that money spent in increased facilities to the public is sure of a speedy return with interest, and in private enterprises competition keeps this principle in fairly active employment.

This is not the case with an institution like the post office, until, at least, each new application of the principle had been[Pg 28] justified by success. A post office is a monopoly, and at certain stages of its history that fact has been its bane. To-day when the demands of social and commercial intercourse make an efficient vehicle for the transmission of correspondence a necessity, the evils inherent in monopolies sink out of sight so far as the post office is concerned.

A peremptory public takes the place of competitors as a motive for alertness. The faults of the institution are freely exposed, and correction insisted upon; and, what is as much to the point, the public contributes of its ingenuity for the improvement of the service. When, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the British public was disgusted with the slowness of its mail carts, and dismayed at the number of robberies, Palmer, a Bath theatre manager, came forward with his scheme for the employment of fast passenger coaches for the conveyance of the mails.

A half century later the public united in a demand for lower postage rates; and Rowland Hill, a schoolmaster, produced a scheme, which for originality and efficacy, has given him a high place among the inventors of the world. To-day the Universal Postal Union affords a medium by means of which the results achieved by every postal administration are brought into a common stock for the benefit of all.

But when Franklin took hold of the North American post office, he had none of these aids to improvement. The measure of the public interest in the post office may be taken from the fact that its total revenue during the first three years of his administration, from 1753 to 1756, was £938 16s. 10d.—but little more than £300 a year.

As for encouragement or stimulus from the outside, there was none. The only connection the American post office had was with the home office; and it is doubtful whether, even if it had been disposed, the British post office could have lent any helpful advice in those days.

The British post office was at that time passing through one of its unprogressive periods. It had come to know by long years of observation what was the volume of correspondence which would be offered for exchange, and it provided the means of transmission, taking care that these should not cost more than the receipts.

Franklin's merit lay in his rising above an indolent reliance on his monopoly, and in his generous outlay for additional facilities, by means of which he not only drew to the post office a large[Pg 29] amount of business, which was falling into other hands, but called into existence another class of correspondence altogether.

It is tolerably certain that had Franklin's work lay in England instead of America, he would have anticipated Palmer's suggestion that the stage coaches be used for the conveyance of the mails, instead of the wretched mail carts which came to be regarded as the natural prey of the highwayman.

At the beginning of 1764 the post riders between New York and Philadelphia made three trips a week each way; and at such a rate of speed that a letter could be sent from one place to the other and the answer received the day following.[49] In reporting this achievement to the general post office, Franklin states that the mails travel by night as well as by day, which had never been done before in America.

Franklin planned to have trips of equal speed made between New York and Boston in the spring of 1764, and the time for letter and reply between the two places reduced from a fortnight to four days. When his arrangements were completed a letter and its reply might pass between Boston and Philadelphia in six days, instead of three weeks.

As a result of these arrangements Franklin anticipated that there would be a large increase in the number of letters passing between Boston and Philadelphia and Great Britain by the packets from New York. That the fruits of his outlay answered his expectations is clear from the fact that the revenues, which up to the year 1756 had scarcely exceeded £300 a year, mounted up to £1100[50] in 1757, and that became the normal revenue for some time after.

It was during this period that the British government began to employ packet boats for the conveyance of the mails to the American colonies. Until this time there had been no regular arrangements for the conveyance of the mails between Great Britain and the colonies. There were no vessels under specific engagement to leave either Great Britain or America at any fixed time.

This is not, of course, to say that there were no means of exchanging correspondence between England and America, or even that the post office had no control over the vessels by which letters were carried. Vessels were continually passing between[Pg 30] Falmouth or Bristol and New York or Boston in the course of trade; and these were employed for the conveyance of mails. Sometimes the letters were made up in sealed bags by the post office before being handed to the shipmasters; and sometimes they were handed loose to the captains, or picked up from the coffee houses.

The captains were under heavy penalties to hand over to the post office all letters in their possession, when they reached their port of destination, and they were entitled to one penny for each letter so delivered to the local postmasters. By this arrangement, the cost of carrying the letters across the Atlantic fell in no degree upon the post office. Indeed, after the act of 1710, the post office made a very good bargain of the business. The postmasters paid the shipmasters a penny a letter, and the act of 1710 authorized them to collect a shilling for each letter delivered to the public.

A service so irregular had its disadvantages, however. Captains were of all degrees of trustworthiness. Some could be depended upon to deliver the letters at the post office as the law directed; others were careless or unfaithful. These either did not deposit their letters with the postmasters promptly as they should have done, or they had private understandings with friends by which the letters did not go into the post office at all, but were delivered by the captains directly to the persons to whom they were directed.

In 1755 the board of trade called attention to the great "delays, miscarriages and other accidents which have always attended the correspondence between this kingdom and His Majesty's colonies in America, from the very precarious and uncertain method in which it has been usually carried on by merchant ships." The remedy sought was a line of sailing vessels devoted entirely to the conveyance of correspondence. Services of this class were not uncommon, although they were usually confined to a time of war. During the war of Spanish Succession, packet ships ran regularly to Holland and to France.

It was during this war when French and Spanish privateers held the southern seas, that the first line of mail packets was established, which ran to North America. In 1705, the British government contracted for five vessels of one hundred and forty tons each, to carry the mails to and from the West Indies.[51] Each vessel was to carry twenty-six men and ten guns. The contractor was paid £12,500 a year.[Pg 31]

A curious feature of the contract was that the contractor was required to enter into a warranty that the receipts from the vessels for mails and passengers would not be less than £8000. If they did not come up to this amount, the contractor had to make up the shortage, up to the sum of £4500 a year. The contract was for three years certain, with an additional two years if the war should last so long.

The postal business of the West Indies was comparatively large at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The receipts for the two years ending January 1706—£10,112[52]—make the American continental business, even under Franklin's capable management, very small by comparison. In 1760 the receipts from the colonial post office of North America were only £1100. This packet service to the West Indies was maintained until the peace of Utrecht in 1713.

During the same period, repeated efforts were made by English merchants, to have a packet service to the North American colonies. In 1704 a petition was presented to the government for a mail service between England and New York.[53] The petitioners asked that the vessels be employed for letters only, in order that by their greater speed they might outrun the merchant vessels on their homeward trips and by giving timely notice, make it possible to send out cruisers to meet the merchant vessels and escort them home in safety. They observed that, in the year before, eighteen of the Virginia fleet were captured because they had set out later than was expected.

The treasury were unimpressionable. They read the memorial, and after adding to it the curt query "Whether the merchants intend to be at the charge," they dismissed it from further consideration. In 1707, the question was again brought to the attention of the treasury, and they asked Blathwayt, a commissioner of trade, to give them a report upon it.

Blathwayt was hearty in support of the proposition.[54] He declared that "Her Majesty's plantations in America are at present the chief support of the kingdom without impairing their own proper strength and yet capable of very great improvements by their trade and other means." He pressed for the establishment of a service with trips six or eight times a year. In view of the war, however, Blathwayt considered it inadvisable to fix upon a[Pg 32] certain rendezvous on either side of the Atlantic, as this would enhance the opportunities for interception by the enemy.

The treasury were willing to have one or two experimental trips made to ascertain what revenue might be expected from the service, if these could be secured without expense; and they accepted a proposition, made about this time, by Sir Jeffry Jeffrys, who was preparing to make two trips to New York.[55] Jeffrys asked that his vessel might be commissioned as a packet boat, and that he might be allowed to retain the postage on all the correspondence which he carried between England and America. There is no record of the result, but from what is known of the postal business in America, it cannot be supposed that it would be of a magnitude to encourage the establishment of a packet service.

Other offers were made to the government, but they were not seriously considered until the outbreak of the war in America between England and France in 1744. Orders were at once given for the restoration of the packet service to the West Indies; and in 1745 armed packets again carried the mails on this route.[56] The service was very expensive; for though the revenue reached the respectable figure of £3921 in the first year, this amount was far from covering the outlay; and as soon as the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed in 1749, the packets were discontinued.

The peace, which followed the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, was of short duration. So far as America was concerned, the treaty did little more than to impose upon the combatants a momentary suspension of arms. It did nothing to remove the causes of war, and while these remained a permanent peace was impossible.

The grounds of dispute were almost entirely territorial. The French claimed the whole vast stretch of country to the west of the Alleghanies, and set up a line of forts along the valley of the Alleghany and Ohio rivers. The English disregarded these claims, and their traders pushed over the mountains into the disputed territory. The French displayed so much energy in dispossessing the encroaching English, that the border country was kept in a state of alarm, and the governors of the English colonies appealed to have a regular means of communication established between the mother country and the colonies, so that help might be obtained if required.

The representations of governors Shirley of Massachusetts,[Pg 33] Delancey of New York, and Dinwiddie of Virginia, were vigorously supported by governor Lawrence of Nova Scotia.[57]

The situation of Nova Scotia was one of peculiar danger. The province was hemmed in between Cape Breton, with its powerful fortress at Louisburg, on the one side, and Canada on the other. The control which the French exercised over the valley of the St. John, and over the isthmus of Baie Verte, gave them a safe and easy passage from Canada to Cape Breton, by way of the St. John river, the bay of Fundy, the isthmus of Baie Verte, and the straits of Northumberland. The Acadians who were scattered over Nova Scotia were naturally in hearty sympathy with their own people in Cape Breton; and in order to send supplies of cattle to the fortress, they made a small settlement at Tatamagouche, on the straits of Northumberland, which served as an entrepôt.[58]

The first result of the appeal of the governors was the establishment of a post office at Halifax, in the spring of 1755,[59] and the opening up of communication with New England by the vessels which plied to and from Boston. It required a ruder prompting before the government could be induced to spend the money necessary for a packet service, and this was not long in coming.

In the early spring of 1755, General Braddock, with two regiments, was sent to America to oppose the large claims made by the French. In concert with the governors of Massachusetts and Virginia, a plan of attack was arranged which involved movements against four different points as widely separated as fort Duquesne on the Ohio river, and Beausejour on the bay of Fundy.

Braddock undertook the expedition against fort Duquesne, which if successful would break down the barrier which was confining the English colonies to the Atlantic seaboard, and relieve the more westerly settlements of Virginia and Pennsylvania from the harassing attacks which were making life on the frontiers unendurable. The execution of his part of the campaign was beset by difficulties, arising partly from the mountainous and woody character of the country through which he had to pass, and partly from his ignorance of the methods of forest warfare, in which his enemies excelled.

Whatever could be accomplished by dogged energy was done successfully. Braddock managed to get his army within sight of his destination. But here his good fortune left him. While still[Pg 34] in the thick woods he was attacked by the French and their Indian allies. Employing methods to which Braddock was a stranger, methods which would have seemed to him to be unworthy of soldiers, the French and their allies managed to keep themselves in perfect cover, while the British army stood exposed, the easiest of marks.

There could be but one outcome. The British were overwhelmed and Braddock slain; and the only result of the campaign was to redouble the fury of the enemy against the unfortunate border settlements.

The disaster and its consequences were brought home to the government with a directness that put an end to all hesitation about establishing the closest possible communication between the mother country and the colonies. On the 18th of September, the board of trade, which administered the affairs of the colonies, approached the treasury on the subject. After emphasizing the inconveniences of the existing arrangements, the board insisted that it was of the highest importance that the king should have "early and frequent intelligence of what is in agitation" in the colonies, and recommended that packet boats be established to New York.[60]

The treasury approved, and directed the postmasters general to arrange for regular monthly trips to New York, and to restore the West Indian service, which was discontinued in 1749. Four vessels of 150 tons each were provided for the latter route.[61] They were to carry twenty-six men each, and be fully armed for war.

For the New York route, larger vessels were thought necessary, owing to the roughness of the winter seas; the vessels placed on this line were each of 200 tons, and carried thirty men. The carrying of any merchandise was forbidden, so that the vessels were devoted entirely to the service of the post office.

In the elaborate instructions which the commanders received, they were directed, when they had a mail for a place at which a postmaster had not been appointed, to open the bags themselves, and deliver the letters for that place to a magistrate or other careful man, who would undertake to have the letters handed to the persons to whom they were addressed. In case the vessel was attacked, and could not avoid being taken, the commander must, before striking, throw the mails overboard, with such a weight attached as would immediately sink them, and so prevent them from falling into the enemy's hands.[Pg 35]

The new service was a most expensive one, and when peace was concluded in 1762, the question of continuing it came up for immediate consideration. During the seven years of its course, the New York service cost £62,603; while the produce in postage was only £12,458. The service was popular, however; and the revenue had been increasing latterly, and an effort was made to reduce the cost.[62] In this the postmasters general were successful, and as the treasury saw reasons for indulging the hope that before long the service would be self-sustaining, they sanctioned the amended terms.

So far as the district in the neighbourhood of New York was concerned, the service was very satisfactory. But the people in the more remote southern colonies had ground for complaint in the length of time it took for their letters to reach them after arriving at New York.

No time was lost in despatching the couriers to the south; but, at the best, between bad roads and no roads at all, there were great delays in delivering the mails to Charlestown. In the fall of 1763, a proposition was made to extend the West Indies service to the mainland, and to require the mail packet to visit Pensacola, fort St. Augustine and Charlestown, before returning to Falmouth.

The extended scheme, which was accepted in 1764, involved an entire reorganization of the postal service of the southern colonies. The colonies to the south of Virginia were separated from the colonies to the north and, with the Bahama Islands, were erected into a distinct postal division, with headquarters at Charlestown.[63]

A sufficient number of vessels were added to make a regular monthly service,[64] but in spite of this, the arrangements did not give satisfaction. The route was too long to make it possible to deliver the mails at Charlestown within a reasonable time. The postmasters general reported that letters for those parts often lay forty or fifty days in London before starting on their way.

It was then resolved to break up the connection between the mainland and the West Indies, and have a separate monthly[Pg 36] service between Falmouth and Charlestown. To secure the greatest measure of advantage from this service a courier was sent off with the mails for Savannah and St. Augustine as soon as they arrived at Charlestown from England.[65]

There were thus, from 1764, three lines of sailing packets running between England and the North American colonies—one to New York, another to Charlestown, and a third to the West Indies. There was but one defect in these arrangements. They did not provide connections between the several systems except through the mother country.

A letter sent from New York to Charlestown or to the West Indies had to travel across to London and back again by the first outward packet to its destination. To connect the two systems on the mainland, a courier travelled from Charlestown northward to Suffolk, Virginia, where he met with the courier from New York.

In dealing with the means for establishing communication between the mainland and the West Indies, the treasury were called upon to consider a petition from the merchants who traded to Florida. The termination of the war was followed by the withdrawal of the troops which were stationed at Pensacola, the principal trading settlement in Florida, and the merchants feared the savages would plunder their goods, if succour could not be easily obtained from the sister provinces.

The first step taken to meet the difficulty was to run a small forty-five ton vessel from Jamaica to Pensacola and on to Charlestown. This was satisfactory as far as it went, but as it took eighty-three days to cover this route and return to Jamaica, this service had to be doubled before the people concerned were content.

[Pg 37]

Having described the several arrangements, which were made to enable the older British colonists to correspond with the mother country and with one another, we shall now turn to Canada.

In the first place an account must be given of the route pursued by the courier, who was shortly to begin regular trips between New York and Montreal. The route is the oldest in North America and the best known. Before either Frenchman or Englishman came to America, the Indian tribes, dwelling on the stretch of land which lies between the waters running south and those running north, passed and repassed over this natural highway in the prosecution of their perpetual wars; and in the long struggle between France and England for mastery of the continent, many of the most decisive battles were fought at different places on the route.

The forts erected by each nation at the several strategic points on the route within its territory indicate their conviction that this was the ordinary course of passage from one country to the other.

A glance at the map confirms this view. From New York to the boundaries of Canada, the few miles of watershed between the Hudson and the lake Champlain systems are the only part of this long route, which could not be easily travelled by vessel. The first long stretch on the journey from New York to Montreal was that between New York and Albany. This part of the trip was made in one of the sloops, which were employed by the merchants of Albany to carry furs, lumber and grain to New York, and which usually returned to Albany empty or with a cargo of brandy, which was considered necessary in their dealings with the Indians. The trip up the river occupied about three days.

From Albany northward, there was a good road on the west side of the Hudson as far as fort Edward, which stood at the bend of the river, where it made a sharp turn to the west. At fort Edward there was a choice of routes, one leading directly north[Pg 38] to lake George, and the other to the north-east to Wood Creek, from which there was a navigable course into lake Champlain.

The lake George route also led into lake Champlain, though the difficulties of the passage from one lake to the other subjected the traveller to the inconvenience of a portage. Lake Champlain offered an uninterrupted course to St. John's in Canada, from which point there was a pleasant trip by carriage to Laprairie, followed by a sail across the St. Lawrence to Montreal. The time taken by travellers over this route was from nine to ten days.

The population of Canada at the period when it became a British province was about seventy thousand, all of whom dwelt on the shores of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries. Travellers between Montreal and Quebec taking the river passage were wont to declare that they seemed to be passing through one long village, so closely were the settlements on each side of the river drawn to one another.

Below Quebec, the country on the north shore in the seigneuries of Beauport and Beaupré, as far east as Cap Tourmente, was as thickly populated as any part of Canada. Beyond that point settlement rather straggled on to Murray Bay. On the south shore from Levis eastward, the census of 1765 showed a population of over ten thousand. A gentleman travelling from Rivière du Loup to Quebec a few years later stated that there were from twelve to sixteen families to every mile of road.

Although people travelling in Canada preferred making their journey by boat, there was a good road from Montreal to Quebec and, what was unique in America at the time, there was a regular line of post houses over the whole road, where calèches or carrioles were always kept in readiness for travellers.

Each maître de poste had the exclusive privilege of carrying passengers from his post house to the next, which was usually about nine miles distant, his obligation being to have the horse and carriage ready on fifteen minutes' notice during the day, and in half an hour, if he were called during the night.

This facility for travel, the advantages of which are obvious, was a gift from France, where it had been in operation since the fifteenth century. When the road between Montreal and Quebec was completed in 1734,[66] the post road system was at once established upon it. It was a convenience which cost the government nothing, the habitant who was appointed maître de poste receiving his pay from the persons whom he conveyed within his limits.[Pg 39] The government confined its attention to seeing that the maître de poste furnished the horses and vehicles promptly.

In September 1760, when the English became masters of Canada by the capitulation of Montreal, Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces, issued new commissions to the maîtres de poste, and fixed the rate at which they should be paid for their services, but gave directions that they should let their horses to no person, who was not provided with a written order from the governor.[67]

A question of much interest is suggested by the fact that the post road between Montreal and Quebec had its origin during the French regime. In France the post roads were part of the postal system of the country, and the question occurs, by what means were letters conveyed within Canada during the period of French rule? It is probable that there was a considerable correspondence between Canada and France, and the lines on which the business of the country was conducted would seem to call for a fairly large interchange of letters within the colony itself. Though the great mass of the people were unable either to read or to write, they differed but little in this respect from the same class of people in other countries. It was not the custom of the time to look to the working classes for patronage for the post office, though even here it is to be observed that the girls of Canada had many opportunities for securing the elements of education, which did not fall in the way of the young men, and with the instinct for graceful expression, which is nature's endowment to French women, it is probable that many letters came from this class. From the towns, however, there would be a relatively large correspondence. Although the populations of Quebec and Montreal were less than that of many of our country towns, and Three Rivers would not bear comparison in that respect with many villages, the social life in these towns was on a high plane. From Charlevoix to Montcalm, every visitor to Canada expressed his astonishment at the refinement and even elegance which he found in the towns. This society, with its seigneurs, military officers, clergy and civil service, would beyond doubt have an extensive correspondence with friends at home. Indeed, mention of the clergy brings up that remarkable series of letters written by Jesuit missionaries from the wilds of Canada, known as the Jesuit Relations, which forms so large a part of the foundation on which the history of the country in the seventeenth century rests. The commercial correspondence was, also,[Pg 40] considerable. All the trade between Canada and France was carried on through the merchants of Quebec. Montreal from its situation at the junction of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers had been the chief town for the Indian trade in furs for over a century, but it did not send its furs directly to France. The Quebec merchants had been the intermediaries for this trade, and they held jealously to the profitable privilege. The imports from France which included a large part of the necessities and conveniences of life, were also handled by the Quebec merchants, who acted as wholesalers to the merchants in Montreal and the other parts of the colony.

It will be obvious from a view of all these circumstances that there must have been a large volume of correspondence to and from as well as within Canada during the French regime. The greater part of it would be between Quebec and the ports of France and the means by which this was carried on, are known. In the Royal Almanach for 1723, it is announced that on letters to Canada there would be a charge of seven sols (about seven cents) which would pay for the conveyance from Paris to Rochelle, while between Rochelle and Canada, letters were carried free of all charge. Between Old and New France, therefore, there was little restriction on correspondence. If a letter going to France were destined for Paris, it would be carried there for seven cents; if for other parts of France, local and personal arrangements would have to be made for their delivery. The case was the same with letters coming to Canada, but addressed to other places than Quebec. Persons living in Montreal, Three Rivers or any other place, who had correspondence with France would arrange with friends in Quebec to take their letters from the captain of the incoming ship, and send the letters to them by the first opportunity. Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, who was travelling through Canada as the guest of the governor, states that, on the way up to Montreal on the governor's bateau, they put in at Three Rivers in order that the officer in charge might deliver some letters, which had been entrusted to him.

The question of establishing such a postal system as existed in France was laid before the governor as early as 1721. In that year Nicholas Lanoullier, a clerk in the treasury, made application for the exclusive privilege of carrying on a postal system between Montreal and Quebec. He pointed out that the only means for the conveyance of letters between Quebec, Three Rivers and Montreal was the canoe, and as there was no regular canoe service,[Pg 41] a person desiring to send a letter had either to hire a canoe, or wait until some person would be found willing to take the letter in the course of his journey. Either mode was obviously unsatisfactory. Lanoullier proposed to open post offices at the three towns, for letters and couriers, and to maintain messageries or an express service, and a line of post houses. There was no road between Montreal and Quebec at this time, and as Lanoullier's scheme involved the construction of a road, the governor granted the application, and in addition gave Lanoullier the exclusive privilege of establishing ferries over the rivers, which would cross the road he undertook to build. As the total population of Canada in 1721 did not exceed 25,000, and the towns of Quebec, Three Rivers and Montreal contained no more than 2300, 325 and 3200 people respectively, an enterprise of that magnitude could not possibly be profitable. Lanoullier no doubt realized this, for he did nothing in pursuance of the scheme. It was ten years after this period before any serious effort was made to construct a continuous road from Quebec to Montreal, and by that time Nicholas Lanoullier's connection with the work had ceased entirely. By a somewhat curious coincidence, when the governor and intendant resolved that the road should be constructed, the duty of superintending the work fell upon a brother of Lanoullier, who was appointed grand voyer or general overseer of the roads of the colony. The office of grand voyer had existed in the colony since 1657, but until Lanoullier's time, it seems to have been neglected, and when the habitants along the road were called upon to work upon it, they obeyed with much reluctance. Lanoullier's difficulties were increased by the hostility of the seigneurs through whose estates the road was to pass, and who resented his making his surveys without deference to their wishes and opinions. He pushed forward the work with much energy, however, and by 1734 the road was opened. The intendant, Hocquart, who had followed the road building with much interest, reported to the king that he himself had made the journey in a carriage from Quebec to Montreal in four days. As soon as the road was declared fit for travel post houses were placed upon it at intervals of about nine miles, and ferries were established for transportation across the broader rivers which crossed the road.

But although no regular postal system was in operation during the French regime, an arrangement existed from an early period, by which the letters of the governor and intendant were carried by an appointed messenger, who was permitted to take with him,[Pg 42] in addition to the official letters, any that might be entrusted to him by private persons. The fee allowed the messenger by the intendant's commission was ten sous for a letter carried from Quebec to Montreal and five sous to Three Rivers, with proportionate charges for greater or shorter distances. The commission which was issued in 1705 by Raudot, the intendant, to Pierre Dasilva dit Portugais, made no provision for regular conveyance, but as the messenger conveyed all the governor's despatches within the colony, it is probable that he made his trips with fair frequency. Another messenger, Jean Morau, received a commission in 1727, though he had been performing the duties of the service for ten years before that date.[68]

A curious fact is disclosed in a memorandum prepared during the period between the capitulation of Canada in 1760 and the treaty of Paris, which settled definitively the possession of the country. The writer, who had hopes that the country would be restored to France, was discussing several measures for improving the administration, when the French returned to the government. Among these was the establishment of a royal post office. In submitting his suggestion he pointed out that the system of royal messengers was expensive to the country, as the letters of private persons were carried and delivered free of charge. By the establishment of a post office, the charges of maintaining it would fall on the persons whose letters were carried, and the treasury would be relieved of the expense.[69]

As has been already stated, when Franklin learned that Canada was to remain a British possession, he came to Quebec to arrange for the establishment of a postal service between Quebec, Three Rivers and Montreal, and for a regular exchange of mails between those places and New York. At Quebec he met with Hugh Finlay, a young Scotchman who had been in the country for three years and who had been performing the very important duties of justice of the peace. In 1765, Finlay was made a member of the governor's council, and until his death, thirty-six years later, took a leading part in the affairs of the colony. Franklin opened a post office in Quebec with Finlay as postmaster and put under his charge subordinate offices at Three Rivers and Montreal. A monthly service by courier was established between Montreal and New York, whose duty it was to have the Canadian mails in New York in time to place those for Great Britain on board the outgoing packet.[Pg 43] In making his arrangements for the exchange of mails between the Canadian offices themselves, Finlay sought and obtained the co-operation of the governor, who directed the maîtres de poste to provide saddle horses for the mail couriers at sixpence a league, which was just half the charge made to the public for the same service, and who issued orders to the ferrymen along the route to pass the couriers over their rivers promptly and without charge.[70] The captains of boats running on the river were instructed in their duty to deliver the letters in their hands to the nearest postmasters who would pay them one cent for each letter. The courier's trips between Montreal and Quebec were made weekly each way, and each trip took about thirty hours. As the distance is one hundred and eighty miles, the advantages of the post house system in facilitating the movements of the couriers are manifest.

A difficulty for which provision had to be made was the extreme magnitude of the postage charges. In 1763 the American post office was still working under the act of 1710, which was enacted at a time when Canada as an English colony was not in contemplation.

The system for which provision was made by the act extended from Piscataway (now Portsmouth, New Hampshire) to Charlestown; and if letters were sent beyond the range of this system, the charge for single letters conveyed up to sixty miles was fourpence; and when the conveyance was from sixty to one hundred miles the charge was sixpence. At the rate of sixpence for one hundred miles, it cost two shillings to send a single letter from New York to Montreal and three shillings from New York to Quebec.

This rate was quite prohibitive. Governors Murray of Quebec, and Gage of Montreal, in 1760, represented to the home government[71] that the people of Canada were almost destitute of cash, and that they would not write to their friends in England until they found private occasions to send their letters to New York. The governors suggested that every interest would be better served if the rates could be made so that the charge on letters between any two places in America might not exceed one shilling and sixpence for a single letter.

In 1765, the act of 1710 was amended to meet the governor's views.[72] The scale of fourpence for sixty miles and sixpence for one hundred miles was not changed, but an addition was made[Pg 44] to it by providing that for each one hundred miles or less beyond the first hundred miles, the additional charge was to be twopence.

The reduction for the longer distances was very considerable. Between New York and Montreal, the act of 1765 lowered the charge for a single letter from two shillings to one shilling, and between New York and Quebec from three shillings to one shilling and fourpence.

Halifax, which had had a post office since 1755, had until this time but little benefit from it owing to the excessive charges. But the amendment of 1765 provided a rate of fourpence on single letters passing between any two seaports in America, and thus put Halifax in comparatively easy communication with Boston and New York.

Here then in its entirety is the postal system of North America as it was completed by the inclusion within it of the new province of Canada. The most important communications were those between America and Great Britain. Of these there were three: with New York, Charlestown and the West Indies. Between each of these places and Great Britain, packet boats carried the mails once a month. These several divisions were united with one another by a small packet from Jamaica to Charlestown, and by a courier from Charlestown to Suffolk, Virginia, where he met with a courier from New York.

Within the northern district, the centre of which was at New York, there was a well-organized mail service, in which all existing travelling facilities were employed to the limit of their usefulness.[73] Mails were transported regularly as far south as Virginia and as far north and east as Quebec and Halifax. Within the better settled parts of the country, the service was excellent. Before the Revolution, two trips were made weekly between New York and Boston, and three between New York and Philadelphia. From Quebec to Montreal, there were two trips every week. The courier service at this time was quite equal, if not superior, to the service in England.

The financial affairs of the American post office flourished. For the three years ending July 1764, there was a surplus revenue of £2070.[74] The succeeding years, though satisfactory, were not equal to those up to 1764.[75][Pg 45]

But the political troubles were rendering the post office an object of unpopularity, and making it a duty on the part of the patriots to employ agencies other than the post office for the transmission of their letters. As these unofficial agencies were usually satisfied with a much lower compensation than the post office demanded, the pleasant circumstance arose for the patriot that the line of interest coincided with the line of duty.

During the period between the establishment of the post office in Canada in 1763, and the outbreak of the war of the Revolution in 1775, the post office pursued on the whole an even, uneventful course. Canada did not entirely escape the influence of the sentiments which in the older colonies were leading to the Revolution; and, as the war approached, the post office was made to feel the effects.

There were, at the time of the peace of 1763, along with the seventy thousand Canadians which made up nearly the whole of the population, a number of the older British subjects, most of whom had come from the British American colonies. At this time they numbered about two hundred, and when the war broke out in 1775, the number had doubled.

These new-comers to Canada were not without the usual practical ability of Americans, and they very soon gathered into their hands the greater part of the business of the colony. They were, however, a source of much trouble and offence to the governor, and to their Canadian fellow subjects. The governor reported that their arrogance, and repugnance to the social and religious customs of the new subjects—the former subjects of France—as well as the factious opposition they displayed to the mode of government then existing, retarded seriously the progress of the efforts which were made towards conciliating the Canadians to the new regime.

Nothing short of the complete domination of these few hundred English-speaking people over the French Canadians would have satisfied them. The spirit of rebellion grew no faster in the older British colonies than among the few of English extraction in Canada, and the mutual distrust between these people and the government hampered the work of the post office a few years later.

In 1767 Finlay was called upon to remove a certain friction which had arisen between the maîtres de poste and the travelling public. The regulations, which confined travelling by post to persons having special permits from the governor, were no longer insisted upon. Any person desiring to do so was at liberty to[Pg 46] hire horses and carriages at any of the post houses for travel to the next post house.

The easing of restrictions enlarged the business of the maîtres de poste. But it evidently did not give unmixed satisfaction, as complaints were made that many persons riding post imposed upon the postmen, "threatening and abusing them contrary at all law."

Finlay had no actual warrant for interfering on behalf of the maîtres de poste, but as postmaster of the province, he had a strong motive for picking up the reins of authority where he found them lying in slack hands. He required the services of the maîtres de poste to help him with the conveyance of the mails, and as those services were rendered for half the charge which was made to the travelling public, he kept the maîtres de poste under his influence by constituting himself their champion. Finlay pointed to the fact that in England the postmaster general was also general master of the post houses, and declared that as deputy of the postmaster general he would take the same position in Canada.

There was the essential difference between the situation in England and in Canada that the postmaster general had statutory authority for exercising control over the post houses in England, whereas there was no such authority for control over the post houses in Canada. However, Finlay was a member of the legislative council, and he assumed, without opposition or question, the charge of the maîtres de poste, and in 1767 issued public notice that the post house system was to be under the same regulations as were in force in England.[76] The maîtres de poste were confirmed in their monopoly, and protected against imposition on the part of the public.

Finlay's energetic management of the affairs of the Canadian post office attracted the attention of his superiors, and as Franklin had resided continuously in England since 1764 as agent for Pennsylvania and other of the American colonies, the expanding scope of the American post office demanded a greater degree of supervision than Franklin's associate, Foxcroft, was able to give.

It was resolved to create another office, until then unknown in America, called a surveyorship. The duties of the surveyor in England are the same as those of the inspector in the Canadian or United States services, and call for a general control over the postal service within certain defined limits. The office of surveyor was established in 1772, and Finlay was appointed to the position.[Pg 47] He was allowed to retain his charge of the post office in Canada, though his salary here underwent an abatement.

The first duty assigned to Finlay as post office surveyor was to explore the uninhabited country beyond the last settlements on the river Chaudiere extending over the height of land into New England.[77] The purpose of the trip was to ascertain the practicability of a direct road between Quebec and New England. The merchants of Quebec had made much complaint of the slowness and irregularity of the ordinary communication with New York, which was by way of Montreal, and they hoped that the proposed road would materially shorten the journey to the principal places in the northern colonies.

The road which the merchants of Quebec desired to see built was a project which had occupied public attention at various times for over a century before this time. When Louis XIV, Colbert his minister, and Talon the intendant, were devising schemes for the creation of a New France in North America, they observed that the long Canadian winters, which shut up the port of Quebec, made it desirable that there should be free access to an ocean port.

The treaty of Breda confirmed England in 1667 in its possession of New York and New Jersey, and also established the right of France to Acadia, which in the French view comprised not only Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but also that section of the state of Maine which lies east of the Kennebec river. In 1671[78] the king directed Talon to see what could be done towards constructing a road between the mouth of the Chaudiere and fort Pentegoet at the mouth of the Penobscot, which was the headquarters of the French governor in Acadia.

The purposes of the king were not unlike those of the fathers of the present confederation. Canada was French and so was Acadia, and the association of the inland with the maritime settlements could not but be productive of good. The populations were small: Canada had six thousand seven hundred, and Acadia four hundred and forty-one,[79] but, for a short period, imperial ideas prevailed.

Talon in 1671 despatched two explorers to Pentegoet. They took different routes, although following the watercourses, and their reports confirmed Talon as to the desirability of establishing permanent communication between the two provinces. His[Pg 48] plans embraced a line of settlements on the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers with a view to imposing a barrier to the advances of the English. But Talon's health gave way, and he returned to France in the fall of 1672, and as the king's ardour towards Canada was cooling off, owing to his absorption in his European wars, the road was abandoned.

The project was revived eleven years afterwards by de Meulles, a later intendant. He was persuaded that if communication were opened, the merchants of Quebec might secure the trade of the Acadians which went entirely to New England, and the Acadians would become attached to Canada. The road would have to be settled upon, and de Meulles' plan was to place old soldiers upon it, as he did not think the Canadians could be induced to give up their comfortable lives, to enter upon a venture of that kind. De Meulles' proposition, however, fell upon deaf ears, as did all others calling for the outlay of money, and the scheme was allowed to lie until Finlay took it up.

From the New England side a movement towards the height of land separating Canada from the English colonies was made in 1754.[80] Governor Shirley of Massachusetts in the early part of that year, set out from Falmouth (now Portland) with eight hundred men on an expedition up the Kennebec river. His purpose was to dislodge any Frenchman who might be settled on the height of land, and to establish a fort to secure the country against attack.

Fort Halifax was erected at the junction of a stream called the Sebastoocook with the Kennebec, and the Plymouth company built a storehouse at the head of navigation on the Kennebec. A carriage road was laid between the fort and the storehouse. The governor anticipated that with fort Halifax as base he might secure the mastery of the Chaudiere and even threaten Quebec.

As Talon in 1671, and Shirley in 1754, so Finlay in 1772 was persuaded that a direct road from Quebec to New England was altogether desirable, and that it might be made without unusual difficulty. It was not, however, in the scheme of things that Finlay should succeed any more than his predecessors. His preparations were soon made. He explained his views to lieutenant governor Cramahe, who headed a subscription to pay Finlay's expenses, and inside of twenty-four hours he had ample means at his disposal for his purpose.[81]

Finlay set out in September 1773 with a party of Indians,[Pg 49] and reached Falmouth after seventeen days of canoeing and following trails. Having become satisfied as to the practicability of the road, he addressed himself to the task of securing the co-operation of those who might be supposed to benefit by the enterprise.

At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he discussed the subject with governor Wentworth. The governor was eager to help with the scheme of establishing a further connection between Canada and the colonies to the south, but was of opinion that the best route would be over the tract of country between the Connecticut river and the St. Francis river in Canada.

This route had several advantages. It avoided the watercourses which made the road from Montreal to New York, and the proposed Kennebec road, useless for so long a period every year; the passage over the height of land was easy, and the country along the line of the route between the height of land and the St. Francis was favourable for settlement.

As Finlay was prepossessed with the governor's plans, the governor set about putting them into execution. He laid a carriageable road along the Connecticut to the boundary of his province, and by April 1774 had a line of settlements along the road so that the post rider would always have a stage at which to pass the night, and generally have one within four hours' travel from any point on the road.

Governor Wentworth lent to Finlay the services of his own surveyor to explore the country on the Canadian side of the route, but before anything could be accomplished in this way, the discontents in the south had broken out in acts of rebellion, and the post office was the first of the institutions of government to be suspended.

At Boston, Finlay laid his plans before governor Hutchinson.[82] The interview was not encouraging. The governor declared that, in the existing temper of the people, it would be enough for the legislature to know that the governor favoured a scheme, to ensure its defeat. The New Englanders had, besides this, but moderate grounds for assisting in establishing further communication with Canada.

The proposed road would be beneficial to Massachusetts in so far as it aided colonization in the northern parts of the province, but as the tract through which the proposed Kennebec road would run lay largely in the grants of the Plymouth company, it would be this company which would be the chief beneficiary of the enterprise,[Pg 50] and the legislature considered that the company should bear the burden of the expense.

The company were not averse from assisting, but they indulged the hope that with their interest in the legislature the government might be induced to bear the cost. Another circumstance that tended to cool the interest of the legislature was the belief that in a short time this northern country was to be detached from Massachusetts, and erected into a separate government. Altogether Finlay concluded that unless the British government undertook the scheme on the New England side, it would not be accomplished at all.

Finlay's tour of exploration was ended by his arrival in Falmouth at the beginning of October. He then entered upon the more extensive duty of inspecting the whole postal service from Maine to Georgia.[83] He travelled southward from Falmouth, inspected every post office, studied the conditions under which the mails were carried, and made a full report of his investigations to the postmaster general.

It is plain from his report that the service had deteriorated seriously since Franklin and Foxcroft had made their last inspection ten years before. Franklin, it will be remembered, had resided in England since 1764, and Foxcroft undoubtedly found it impossible to give proper attention to the post offices throughout the country, and at the same time to keep abreast of the official routine at the head office.

The postmasters on the whole impressed Finlay favourably. They understood their duties and seemed to be making a commendable struggle against the demoralization which confronted them however they turned. Only a small proportion of the letters which circulated within the colonies passed through the post office, although their conveyance by any other means was illegal. The consequence was that the revenues of the post office were small.

At Falmouth the greater part of the letters from Boston were delivered by the masters of sailing vessels. The postmaster on one occasion attempted to enforce the law against illegal conveyance by seizing the letter bag on one of the incoming ships; but the populace made so marked a manifestation of its displeasure that he did not venture on that course a second time.

It was not so much, however, by direct defiance of the postal law, although instances of this were not wanting, as by evasions of it, that the monopoly of the post office was broken down. But[Pg 51] in many cases the evasions were so palpable that they could deceive nobody. A popular mode of escape from the penalties attaching to the breach of the monopoly was to seek shelter under one of the exceptions which the post office act allowed.

In none of the acts, for instance, is objection made to a person sending a letter to a correspondent by his own servant, or by a friend who happened to be journeying to the place where the letter should be delivered. Another exception to the monopoly was made in favour of letters which accompanied merchandise to which letters related. Thus a merchant in filling an order for goods has always been at liberty to send with them the invoice, or any other communication, having presumable reference to them. This was the excepted article, which served the turn of those eluding the monopoly.

What Finlay saw at New Haven illustrates fairly what was going on throughout the colonies. Riders came in from other towns, their carts laden with bundles, packages, boxes and canisters, and every package had a letter attached. Some of the parcels consisted of no more than little bundles of chips, straw, or old paper, but they served their purpose. If the postmaster made objection to the number of letters they carried, the riders asserted their right to carry letters accompanying goods, and the public saw to it that neither postmaster or magistrate took too narrow a view of what constituted goods.

On the route between Boston and Newport the mail carrier was a certain Peter Mumford, who did a much larger business in the illegal conveyance of letters than as the servant of the post office. At Newport the postmaster declared that there were two post offices—the king's and Mumford's—and the latter did the larger business. There was no remedy, as the postmaster declared that whoever should attempt to check the illegal practice would be denounced as the friend of slavery and oppression and the declared enemy of America.

Many of the couriers did so large a carrying business that the conveyance of the mails became a mere incident with them. As he approached New Haven, Finlay was accosted with the inquiry whether he had overtaken the post bringing in a drove of oxen, which the courier had engaged to do, when he came in with the mail.

In all respects but one, the situation described by Finlay presented no unexpected features. There had been no general inspection since Franklin made his tour in 1763, at the time he opened the[Pg 52] post office in Quebec. This fact fully explains the shortcomings of the postmasters and couriers. That the postmasters were chargeable with so few irregularities in their accounts, or were open to so little censure for faults in management, is high testimony to their intelligence and fidelity to duty.

Mail couriers have always been less completely identified with the postal service than postmasters. They are held by contract, not by appointment, and their engagements are for short terms. There is nothing irregular in their practice of combining the conveyance of the mails with other means of gaining a livelihood, but in the absence of supervision there was a constant tendency to give undue attention to what should have been merely auxiliary employments of carrying passengers and parcels.

People employing the couriers demanded prompt service, while there was no person to insist on the prior claims of the post office, and indeed there were probably few people in any community at that time to whom an hour more or less was of any consequence in the receipt of their letters.

The evasion of the postmaster general's monopoly also was too common to excite particular remark. It was beyond doubt a breach of the law, but that it was wrong was a proposition to which few even good citizens gave assent, at least by their practice. Thomas Hancock made a merit of his saving the colony of Connecticut from thirty to forty shillings a year through the interest he had with certain captains, which enabled him to secure the colonial letters, as they came over in the ships, and thus prevent their passing through the post office.

In England, also, the practice was wellnigh universal. The increased rates imposed by the act of 1710 gave an immense impetus to clandestine traffic. Every pedlar and driver of public coaches lent himself to the profitable business of carrying letters for a few halfpence a letter. In London an effort was made to stop the practice by having officials of the post office frequent the roads leading into the city, for the purpose of searching the vehicles of those who had made themselves objects of suspicion.

It is interesting to note that the work for which the post office surveyors or inspectors were first appointed was to detain the mail couriers in the course of travel, and check the contents of the mail bags, and thus prevent postmasters from becoming parties, as they too frequently were, to frauds on the revenue, to their own great advantage.[Pg 53]

As late as 1837, when Rowland Hill[84] laid his penny postage scheme before a public which was impatient for its adoption, Richard Cobden declared to a committee appointed to report on the scheme, that five-sixths of the letters passing between Manchester and London were conveyed by private hand. This state of things continued until the postage rates were brought down to a point, at which the service offered by the post office was cheaper as well as better than any other. The only certain means by which a government monopoly in a free country can maintain its position is to outbid its rivals. There is no safe dependence to be placed in legal process.

In ordinary times, then, the evasion of the exclusive privilege of the postmaster general by any community would deserve no more than passing mention. It is as part of a general boycott of the government that the action of the Americans is worthy of note.

From the time of the passage of the stamp act in 1765, the attitude of the colonies towards all schemes in which taxation by Parliament could be detected was one of resistance active or passive. When this act went into operation, the Americans bound themselves to import nothing from England, a self-imposed obligation which in the undeveloped state of their manufactures entailed much inconvenience and even distress.

There was an essential difference between the English and the American methods of avoiding the penalties for infractions of the post office law. In England, and to some extent doubtless in America as well, men engaged in the illegal conveyance of letters did their best to conceal their operations from the authorities. The efforts of a public coach driver were directed to rendering the search made by the post office inspectors fruitless. If letters were found in his possession, he suffered the legal penalties as the smuggler does to-day. It was one of the chances of his trade.

In the colonies men who were bent on circumventing the post office pursued another course. They indulged their taste for legal technicalities by carrying their letters openly, and maintaining that the packages which accompanied them took them outside the monopoly, and they gave scope to their humour by making the packages as ridiculous as possible. They incurred no great risk, for the active spirits in every community threatened a prosecutor with a coat of tar and feathers.[Pg 54]

The stamp act was repealed in the year following its enactment, and for the moment trade resumed its wonted course. But it was not for long. The British government was determined that the legislative supremacy of parliament should be recognized in America, and the colonies were equally persistent in their denial of this supremacy; and in the conflict which ensued the principle weapons employed by the Americans until the outbreak of the war were non-importation and non-exportation agreements.

As the British merchant exercised a preponderating influence with the government, the stoppage of trade with America, as the result of a constitutional dispute, was an effective instrument in making the government consider the situation seriously. The difficulty with the government was to understand the attitude of mind which prevailed among the Americans.

The government had no quarrel with the principle that representation should be a condition of taxation. It would have asserted the principle on any occasion, but it could not see that the course it was pursuing was a violation of that principle. Parliament, it declared, was the great council of the nation, representing those parts beyond the sea as well as those at home, and its measures bound the whole nation.

It was still, it must be remembered, half a century before the time when the agitations which preceded the great reform bill of 1832 had familiarized the country with the distinction between virtual and actual representation. The British parliament was far from being, and indeed made no pretence of being a representative assembly in the sense in which the phrase is now used. The right to send members to parliament had for centuries been exercised by the electors of counties and certain ancient boroughs, and no enlargement of the representation was made from 1677 until 1832,[85] in spite of the great changes in population and industrial importance which had taken place in the course of time.

Great manufacturing towns such as Manchester and Leeds sent no members to represent them in parliament, while Old Sarum which did not contain a single house elected two members. To a people, who saw nothing in this state of things inconsistent with the theory of representative government, the colonial view would be quite incomprehensible.

The colonist on the other hand with his strict representation in town meetings and colonial assemblies, and without the historical aids to an understanding of the point of view of the home government,[Pg 55] saw little of a truly representative character in the British system. But he did see, what the home government did not, that a body of distinct and separate interests had grown up in America of which parliament had a very inaccurate conception, and with which it was in no way qualified to deal.

The attitude of the colonists did not appear to the government to be quite free from insincerity. For half a century and more, the government declared, the colonists had been subject to taxes in the shape of post office charges imposed by the act of 1710, and they had never raised a question.

In the Newcastle correspondence, there is a paper, dated 1765, containing a discussion on the legality of a tax on the trade with the Spanish West Indies. In the course of the paper it is asserted that parliament, by the post office act of Queen Anne, imposed an internal tax on the colonies without their presuming to dispute the jurisdiction of parliament over them.

The disturbances in America which followed upon the attempts to enforce the stamp act surprised and alarmed the government, and a committee of parliament was appointed to consider what their future course would be. Franklin who, as the representative of several of the colonies, had been in London for a considerable time, was among the witnesses examined by the committee. His examination took a wide range, but the point of interest was the question as to what ground in principle the Americans stood upon in objecting to the stamp act, since they had accepted the post office act of 1710.

For Franklin this was a crucial question, as he had been not only administering the post office in America for twelve years past, but he did not conceal his satisfaction that by his management he had been able for several years to send substantial sums to Great Britain as profits from the institution.

Franklin answered the questions with much ingenuity. The money paid for the postage of a letter was not in the nature of a tax; it was merely a quantum meruit for a service done; no person was compellable to pay the money if he did not choose to receive the service. A man might still, as before the act, send his letter by a servant, a special messenger, or a friend, if he thought it safer and cheaper.

The answer would have been quite just, if the postmaster general of England had not held a monopoly of letter carrying in America. While a person is free to use or not to use a certain service, the charge for the service is not in the nature of a tax.[Pg 56] If a person does not like the price demanded by the post office for its services, he may seek other means of having his letters carried. But the post office act does not leave a person free to employ other agencies for the conveyance of his letters. The monopoly has attached to it heavy penalties for its infringement.

It is true, as Franklin said, that the post office act leaves it open to a man to employ a servant, special messenger, or friend in the course of his travel, to carry his letters. But the mention of these agencies shows the absurdity of Franklin's contention. A merchant in New York having business to transact by letter with a customer in Boston or Philadelphia could not afford to pay the expenses of his messenger or servant unless the transaction were one of considerable magnitude. Nor could he await the chance of a friend's making a visit to either of these places. He might, if he were free to do so, have entrusted his letters to a coach driver who made a business of passing between New York and the other two towns, but the monopoly of the post office stood in his way, and the coachman would have made himself liable to a heavy fine.

In short, if the merchant had to correspond with neighbouring places he was compelled to employ the post office. With a country so extended and so highly civilized as the American colonies were at that day, a postal system was an absolute necessity; and if the system maintained by the government were protected by a monopoly, its charges were a tax on the users of the system in so far as those charges exceeded the strict cost of carrying on the service.

Furthermore, since the post office act of 1710 was imposed on the colonies without their consent, and since Franklin's good management had enabled him to pay all the expenses of the service and send a considerable surplus to England for some years past, it is plain that to the extent of the yearly surplus the colonies had been subject to a tax laid on them without their consent, and that Franklin himself was the tax gatherer. This was undoubtedly where the point lay in the question which was asked of Franklin.

Franklin's views on the constitutionality of the post office charges were part and parcel of his views on taxation generally. For instance, he drew a clear line of distinction between a tax on imported goods and an internal tax such as the stamp act. A duty on imported goods it was permissible for parliament to impose on the colonies, while an internal tax could not properly be levied without consent.

The stamp act required that all commercial and legal documents[Pg 57] and newspapers should be written or printed upon stamped paper which was sold by agents of the government at varying prices prescribed by the law. As this was a tax which could not be avoided so long as men carried on their business in the ordinary way and by the ordinary means, it was one for which the consent of the colonies was necessary.

An import tax stood on a different footing. It was simply one of the elements entering into the price of the goods imported. If people objected to the price as enhanced by the tax, it was open to them to decline to buy the goods. A tax of this sort was in Franklin's view quite within the powers of the sovereign state.

The ultimate test applied by Franklin to determine whether a tax could in a given case be constitutionally imposed, was whether or not there was a legal mode of escape from the tax. If the tax were an avoidable one, it was constitutional, since submission to it implied consent. If, on the other hand, the tax were one which from the necessities of the case could not be avoided, it ought not to be imposed until it had been assented to by the people.

Opinions may differ as to which of the two classes the application of the test would place postal charges in. They constituted a tax beyond any question since they turned into the government a surplus of revenue after all expenses had been met. Whether they were to be regarded as an avoidable tax to be paid or not as one cared to employ the services of a post office or not, or whether as a tax which the circumstances of the community made it necessary to accept, will depend on one's views as to whether a post office is indispensable to the community.

It is difficult to see how Franklin, who of all men of his generation knew best the requirements of a highly developed industrial community, could believe that the necessities for the interchange of correspondence on the part of a people like the American colonists could be satisfied by private messengers, or travelling friends, or indeed by any agency less comprehensive than a national postal system.

[Pg 58]

But the time was well past when the question as to what was or what was not an allowable tax possessed any but an academic interest. Though the stamp act was repealed a few months after it went into operation, the trouble it aroused was not allayed. The gratitude of the colonists which followed upon the repeal gave way to renewed irritation when it was found that the ministry in London had only postponed, not definitely abandoned, its schemes of taxation, and the late triumph gave vigour to the determination of the colonists to continue their resistance.

Step followed step. All went to widen the breach, and diminish the chances of a peaceful settlement. The post office soon became involved. As we have seen, the ministry endeavoured to convict the colonists of, at least, inconsistency when they objected to the stamp act, while tolerating the post office. Franklin explained what seemed to him the points of difference between the two things, without convincing the ministry.

The colonists had fully shared Franklin's opinions, but the attitude of the ministry caused them to look more thoughtfully into the matter. They finally agreed that the ministry might be right in insisting that the post office charges were a tax, and refused to use the institution any longer. Finlay found that everywhere the view prevailed that the post office was unconstitutional, and it was becoming hazardous to patronize it.

While Finlay was in the southern states the Boston tea riots took place, and before he reached New York on his return home, Franklin had been dismissed, and he had been appointed to replace Franklin.

The reasons which led to Franklin's removal have been frequently stated. They must be related again in order to complete the narrative. Franklin had become possessed, by means still unrevealed, of a number of private letters written by Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, and Oliver, the lieutenant governor, to a friend in England. The letters dealt with the condition of[Pg 59] affairs in the colony, and discussed the situation with the full freedom which a confidential correspondence is apt to encourage.

Hutchinson and Oliver dwelt upon the turbulent disposition of Boston, expressed grave doubts as to the possibility of allowing the full measure of English liberty in the colonies, and asserted the necessity of a military force to support the government. When these letters were brought to Franklin, he saw the advantage that a knowledge of them would give the colonists in the struggle then going on, and as the agent for Massachusetts, he asked for permission to send the letters to the colony for perusal by a few of the leading men. Permission was granted on Franklin's express undertaking, that the letters should not be printed or copied.

In Boston, the letters were passed from hand to hand among the popular leaders, and were finally discussed at a secret sitting of the assembly. The assembly adopted resolutions strongly condemnatory of Hutchinson and Oliver, as sowers of discord between the mother country and the colonies, declared the letters to be incitements to oppression on the part of the ministry, and petitioned the king to remove Hutchinson and Oliver from their government.

The publication of the letters gave rise to great astonishment in England, and one of the consequences, before Franklin confessed his part in the transaction, was a duel between a brother of the person to whom the letters were written, and a gentleman whom he accused of disclosing them to the public. In England Franklin met with universal condemnation, and he was at once dismissed from his position as deputy postmaster general in America.

It is noteworthy as illustrating, partly Franklin's good nature, and partly the apparent inability of the officials of the post office to understand the state of mind of the ministry, that in spite of his dismissal or of the reasons for it, Franklin remained on good terms with the heads of the post office.

There was some delay in settling the accounts of Franklin with the post office, but that was due to a lack of promptness on the part of Foxcroft, Franklin's official associate, in rendering the accounts. When the balance due by Franklin was paid, his relations with the post office did not entirely cease; for he offered himself, and was accepted, as one of the sureties for Foxcroft on the re-appointment of the latter as joint deputy postmaster general with Hugh Finlay.

For some time previous to the events which led to Franklin's[Pg 60] removal from the service, plans were being considered for putting the administration of the post office on a better footing. Although New York was, by the terms of the act of 1710, made the official headquarters of the service, it had not been so up till this time. There seems to have been no fixed official residence. In 1749, the deputy postmaster general resided in Virginia, and his predecessor in North Carolina. Franklin and Foxcroft both happened to live in Philadelphia, and that city accordingly became the headquarters of the postal system.

It was determined in England that, after the 10th of October, 1773, New York should be the permanent administrative centre. A central office was to be established, a general secretary appointed, and suitable clerical assistance provided for the carrying on of the work of administration. When Finlay was made joint deputy postmaster general in Franklin's place, he continued to act as travelling surveyor.

But the plans under contemplation did not come to maturity. Already measures were on foot which in a short time deprived the post office of its business in America. In March 1774, the colonists began a movement to establish a postal system, which would be independent of the regular post office.

The committee of correspondence in Boston, which was the organ through which the opponents of government carried on their work, wrote to the committee in Salem introducing William Goddard, and suggesting the advisability of establishing a post office in America.[86]

The present post office, it was stated, was founded on an act of the British parliament for raising a revenue from the colonies without their consent, and for that reason was as obnoxious as any other revenue act. The post office was being used as a precedent against the colonies when they contested the right of parliament to tax them, and furthermore, was now being employed to prevent the dissemination of popular intelligence. Goddard, for whom the Boston committee bespoke good will, would explain to their associates in Salem by what means certain newspapers identified with the people's cause were prevented from circulating.

Goddard was not ill-fitted to take the lead in the agitation against the post office. He was the son of the postmaster of New London, and had been himself for two years postmaster of Providence, and in this way was quite familiar with the details of work[Pg 61] in a post office. Moreover, during his residence in Providence, and afterwards in Philadelphia and Baltimore, he was constantly engaged in newspaper enterprises.

As Goddard's schemes were, for the most part, unsuccessful, his wits never lost the edge that adversity usually gives. His grievance was that the post office charged rates so excessive on the newspapers he wished to circulate that he was unable to send them to his readers throughout the colonies.

What measure of truth there was in Goddard's statements we have no means of ascertaining. But there was no doubt that the charge might be true, without the post office exceeding its legal rights. The fact was that newspapers had no special legal standing under the post office act.

That act was passed in 1710, when newsletters in manuscript were in service and newspapers were too few and unimportant to engage the attention of the post office or of parliament at the time the law was being framed. Consequently no express provision was made for them in the act. If newspapers were to be carried by the post office under the authority of the act, it could only be by treating them as letters, and a glance at the scale of charges will show the impossibility of newspapers bearing so burdensome a tax.

The newspapers of that day were inconsiderable in size compared with those that are now published, but few even at that time would weigh less than an ounce, and an ounce letter passing between New York and Philadelphia called for a postal charge of three shillings or seventy-two cents. This sum was the lowest charge in the scale for ounce letters passing between any two places of importance in America.

Clearly newspapers could not circulate by means of the post office if they were to be regarded as letters. But as they were not mentioned in the act, newspapers had at least the advantage of not being subject to the postmaster general's monopoly. Publishers were free to turn to account any means of conveyance that happened to be available, for the distribution of their newspapers. Unfortunately, however, this freedom was of little benefit at that period, as there were no courier services regularly operating between the towns in America.

There was nothing for it but for publishers to take advantage of the postal system if this were at all possible, and the possibility appeared through one of those curious devices, which are the derision of logical foreigners, but which afford a means of escape[Pg 62] from the inconveniences of a law, which it is not desired to alter at the time.

In England, where the situation of newspaper publishers was the same as it was in America, the privilege of franking newspapers for transmission through the mails was conferred upon certain officials of the post office, called clerks of the road. Clothed with this privilege the clerks of the road bargained with publishers for the conveyance of their newspapers in the ordinary mails, and put the proceeds into their own pockets.

It was a practice that was not regarded as in any way irregular. The post office was quite aware that its vehicles were being used for the conveyance of newspapers, from which it received no revenue, and it congratulated itself that it had hit upon a contrivance for serving the public without having to tamper with the act under which it operated.

The privilege of franking newspapers, which was enjoyed by the clerks of the road in England, was also conferred upon the deputy postmasters general in America, and colonial newspapers were distributed by the post office under arrangements similar to those described. While the act itself made no provision for the conveyance and delivery of newspapers, this peculiar plan offered great advantages to the publisher.

There was, however, one serious objection to it. Not resting on the law, but on the good will of those in authority, it could be terminated at any time, and the post office might legally charge sums as high as the postage on letters for the conveyance of newspapers. With this power in its hands the post office had complete control over the fortunes of newspaper publishers. If for any reason it desired to suppress a newspaper, all that was necessary was to cancel the special arrangement between the deputy postmaster general and the publisher, and leave to the latter the option of paying letter rates or of finding some other means of conveyance.

Whether this power was exercised in Goddard's case, is not known; that it would be, if considered necessary, is beyond doubt. In 1737, the clerks of the road in England were directed to take particular care that no newspapers were sent by the post office which contained reflections on the government,[87] and to assure themselves on the point, they were to send no newspapers into the country at all, except such as were purchased from a single dealer named in the order, whose loyalty and judgment were not open[Pg 63] to question. The possession of this power by the government was quite sufficient to arouse reasonable apprehensions.

Goddard appears to have succeeded in his mission to Salem, as a few days later the committee of that town, responding to the letter from Boston, declared that the act of the British parliament establishing the post office in America, was dangerous in principle and demanded peremptory opposition.[88] A considerable sum was raised for the fund to set up a colonial post office, although Salem was in financial straits at the time.

Having succeeded in the first part of his campaign, Goddard went a step forward, and drew up a plan for an independent American post office, and laid it before the committees of correspondence in all the colonies.[89] His proposition was that the colonial post office should be established and maintained by subscription, and that its control should be vested in a committee to be appointed annually by the subscribers. This committee would appoint postmasters and post riders, and fix the rates of postage. The immediate management of the service was to be under the direction of a postmaster general to be selected by ballot, and who should hold his office by a yearly tenure.

Goddard set about procuring subscribers for his scheme, and, it would seem, with much success. In the meantime, however, events were taking place which brought into being a body of more authority than the committees of correspondence, and this body took over the establishment of an American post office.

The punitive measures of the ministry which followed upon the Boston riots had the unexpected result of uniting all the colonies into common cause with Boston. In September 1774, the delegates of the colonies assembled in congress at Philadelphia, and by degrees took upon themselves all the functions of government. On the 29th of May, 1775, the question of providing for the speedy and secure conveyance of intelligence was submitted to the congress, and a committee, of which Benjamin Franklin was the leading member, was directed to make a report.[90]

With the report before it, on July 26, the congress resolved[91] to appoint a postmaster general for the United Colonies, whose office would be at Philadelphia, and who was empowered to appoint a secretary and as many postmasters as seemed to him proper and necessary. A line of posts should be established from Falmouth[Pg 64] to Savannah, with as many cross posts as the postmaster general saw fit.

Goddard was a candidate for the position of postmaster general, but Benjamin Franklin was chosen. Goddard's friends then made an effort to secure to him the secretaryship. In this, also, he was disappointed, as Franklin selected his son-in-law, Bache, for the place, an appointment which brought down upon Franklin a charge of nepotism.

It seems certain, however, that in no case would he have entrusted the secretaryship to Goddard. Goddard had been postmaster of Providence, and when he relinquished the office, he was a defaulter for a considerable amount.[92] As the loss from Goddard's defalcation fell partly upon Franklin, as joint deputy postmaster general, the latter would be reluctant to place him a second time in a position of responsibility. Notwithstanding the claims he would seem to have created for himself by his work in organizing the colonial post office, Goddard had to be contented with the surveyorship of the posts.[93]

Shortly after the service had been put in operation, the continental congress discussed whether it would not be advisable to suppress the king's post office.[94] Those in favour of the measure argued that the ministerial posts were no longer necessary to the people; that they merely subserved the interests of the enemy, and that the postmasters held their offices by an illegal tenure. On the other hand, it was urged that, closely watched as they were, the ministerial posts could not lend themselves to harm, and that they furnished the people with so many more means of communication.

The argument which finally prevailed, however, was presented by the opponents of the proposition. They pointed out that this would be an extreme and irretrievable measure, an act of hostility, which would not be warranted by the position in which they stood. All that the colonies desired, they declared, was a return to the conditions which prevailed in 1763, when the conquest of Canada removed the last of the obstacles which impeded their progress, and the relations of the colonies with the mother country seemed permanently and satisfactorily established. Late advices from England indicated that parliament was showing a renewed spirit of conciliation, and any course was to be deprecated which would prevent an easy return to the old conditions.[Pg 65]

The matter was laid over, but it was settling itself in another way. Great Britain was recognizing the futility of persisting in its efforts to maintain the post office in the colonies. As early as March 1775, the home office advised its deputies in America that all that was to be expected from the postmasters in the colonies was that they should act with discretion to the best of their abilities and judgment.[95] It ceased for the time to give positive directions.

Finlay, who, at some personal risk, had gone to New York to make up his accounts, reported that the post office was doing but little business, as the rebels were opening and rifling the mails, and were notifying the loyally disposed that it was unconstitutional to use the king's post office.

There was swift punishment visited upon erroneous constitutional views at that time. Finlay foresaw that the post office could not long continue, and he proposed that the work of distributing the mails should be done on one of the war vessels in New York harbour.[96] At last, on Christmas day 1775, the secretary of the post office at New York gave public notice that on account of the interruptions to the couriers in several parts of the country the inland service would cease from that date, and thus was closed an important chapter in the history of the British post office in North America.[97]

With the outbreak of the war, the postal connection between New York and Montreal instantly ceased. When this event took place the service to and from Canada was in a very efficient state. Two couriers travelled each week between Montreal and New York, one passing by way of lake George, and the other pursuing the route through Skenesborough (now Whitehall); and post offices were opened at Crown Point and Fort Edward.

It was far, however, from the wishes of the provincial congress of New York to allow the communication with Canada to be broken. This body, after a conference with Price, a gentleman from Montreal, despatched a letter to the merchants of that place, expressing their strong desire that the intercourse existing between New York and Canada should be maintained.[98] They disclaimed any intention of aiming at independence, protested their loyalty to the king, and their attachment to the house of Hanover, which they ranked "among our most singular blessings."

All congress desired was the rights belonging to them as British subjects. They proposed to establish a postal courier[Pg 66] between New York and either Ticonderoga or Crown Point, leaving it to Canadians to open a communication between Montreal and such of these two places as might be decided upon.

When the American troops, continuing their advance northward, captured Montreal, Franklin established a post office there, appointing as postmaster George Measam, who afterwards entered the American service.[99] In the ledger kept by Franklin, as postmaster general of the United Colonies, the account of the postmaster of Montreal appears in its place among the colonial post offices. The postage on letters from New York to Montreal was fixed at four pennyweight, and to Quebec at five pennyweight.[100]

Until relief arrived, Finlay was confined within the walls of Quebec, and Foxcroft's usefulness was equally curtailed by the fact that he and Dashwood, the departmental secretary, were held prisoners at New York.[101] While the British were being thus deprived of all the usual means of communication, the American service was being put in a high state of efficiency.

In this, as in other respects, the colonists were fortunate in having the services of Franklin. In August, following upon the proclamation of independence, Franklin was directed to arrange a system of communications whereby post riders were placed at intervals of twenty-five or thirty miles over the whole stretch from Falmouth (now Portland) to Georgia, the mails being carried from post to post from one end of the country to the other, three times a week.[102]

The riders were to travel night as well as day, and there was to be no more delay at the changing posts than was necessary to pass the mails from one rider to the other. Three advice boats, also, were employed to run from North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia to the place of assembly of the continental congress.

After the royal post office was driven off the mainland, it took refuge on one of the war vessels, which lay in New York harbour. The postmaster of New York received and opened the mails on board the ship, and all letters were advertised, so that they might be obtained either directly or through friends. The Americans, however, had a keen sense of the importance of communications, and from the beginning of the struggle, made every effort to intercept the packets.

Early in May 1775, while the more cautious Americans were[Pg 67] opposing any step that would lead to extremities, Finlay reported that he was on board the ship "King Fisher," and that a vessel manned by sixty resolute fellows was cruising about Sandy Hook, in the hope of intercepting the packet "Mercury," which was due to arrive.[103]

In consequence of the burning of Falmouth by a British naval expedition, letters of marque and reprisal were issued in November by the province of Massachusetts Bay; and in the following March, the continental congress sanctioned the fitting out of private armed vessels to prey upon British commerce.[104] Seaport towns were enjoined that on no account should they furnish provisions to war vessels coming to them.

The ministry were under no delusions as to the situation. At the end of September, the packets were withdrawn from general post office duty, armed as for war, and placed at the orders of the war office. The movements of the packets were clothed with secrecy, and it was only when the vessels were bound for Halifax that the public were notified that a mail was being despatched. From Halifax, the mails were taken by the first opportunity to Boston or New York.

The attitude of the post office to all these preparations for war was very curious. It seemed incapable of understanding why exceptional measures were necessary at that time. A steady murmur of discontent was kept up against the war office. Remonstrance after remonstrance was directed against the commander-in-chief for the detention of the packets beyond what seemed a reasonable delay, and there was continual complaint against the restrictions placed upon the post office.

Until the middle of the year 1776, although the service had been on a complete war footing for some months past, there had been no actual clash between the British and American vessels. The correspondence, however, reveals a state of great anxiety for the safety of the despatches, and as the vessels put out, the masters were placed under strict injunctions to sink the mails if there was any likelihood of capture.

The first recorded engagement in which the packets on any of the North American stations were concerned, took place on the 17th of July. The master of the "Lord Hyde" reported[105] that on his passage from Falmouth to New York, he saw at four o'clock[Pg 68] in the morning of that day a ship and a brig three or four leagues distant. They spoke to one another, and then gave chase to the packet. The ship fell out of sight, but the brig followed hard, and at four in the afternoon came up with the packet and began to fire, at the same time running a red English ensign to the topmast head.

The master of the packet, seeing no chance for escape, shortened sail and prepared for action. The brig came up alongside, replacing the English ensign by a flag of thirteen stripes with a small union in it, and without more ado poured into the packet a broadside from eight carriage guns, and a number of swivels and small arms. The packet returning the fire, a warm engagement followed for an hour and a half at a distance of fifty or sixty yards. The brig then bore away. The packet was much shattered in her sails and rigging, but wonderful to relate, the only casualties were the slight wounding of five persons.

The "Sandwich" packet, which left New York on the 20th of August, reported[106] an encounter with a fast schooner bearing the New England colours, a white field with a pine tree in the middle. After some manoeuvring, in which it appeared that the plan of the schooner was to keep in the wake of the packet outside the range of the latter's guns, but near enough to take advantage of the superior weight of her own guns, the packet managed to bring the schooner into an action which lasted for nearly two hours. The rigging, sails and masts of both vessels were much damaged, but the packet came out of the encounter without any person being even wounded.

The third engagement was a more serious affair. The packet "Harriott," on the New York station, was attacked on the 17th of September by a privateer of twelve guns and over one hundred men. The packet, which was armed and equipped in the same manner as the other packets on this station, had twelve guns, but only forty-five men. Of these five were killed, including the captain, and nine were wounded. Through the gallantry of the mate, Spargo, the packet managed to avoid capture. For his good conduct on this occasion, Spargo was made master of the "Harriott."

On the 1st of March, 1778, the "Harriott," in violation, it would seem, of the instructions given to all the masters of packets to avoid a fight, if possible, captured the American vessel "Sea Nymph," of one hundred and twenty tons burden, laden with[Pg 69] gunpowder, saltpetre, gun flints and other wares, and brought it into New York.[107]

While the packet boats were thus occupied in foiling the enemy's attempts upon them, the course of events had restored to the post office a footing on land in America. The arrival of assistance from England in May enabled Carleton to attack the American force which had held Quebec in siege since the November previous, and the retreat of the Americans which ensued was not stayed until they had been driven entirely out of Canada.

Finlay, who had spent the winter in Quebec, and who has been credited with one of the best anonymous accounts which have come down to us of the conditions of the city during the siege, at once prepared to resume his duties as deputy postmaster general. New York, also, fell again into the hands of the British, owing to the withdrawal of Washington's army in September, before the superior forces of Howe.

Here Foxcroft, the deputy postmaster general, and Dashwood, the departmental secretary, were prisoners of war; and Antill, the postmaster of New York, had taken up quarters in one of the war vessels in the harbour. Antill lost no time in returning to the city; and Foxcroft and Dashwood were set free by an exchange for two American officers which took place shortly after.[108]

Like Finlay, Foxcroft made preparations for the resumption of business; but for both Finlay and Foxcroft an unexpected thing happened. Vessels with mails began to arrive at Quebec and New York, but the mails were not taken to the post office, although the statute laid it upon shipmasters as their duty to deliver the mails at the post office before they broke bulk.[109] On the arrival of the vessels, the commanders-in-chief directed the masters to send the letters up to their headquarters, where they were gone over by confidential officers, on whom were imposed the duties of handling the incoming mails.

The reason of this step will be sufficiently obvious, although the post office professed that they had never seen any good purpose served by it. Even where there was no suggestion of disloyalty among the citizens, there were infinite possibilities of harm in the unguarded utterances, which are constantly occurring in familiar letters. Matters, which it is of the highest importance to keep concealed from the enemy, may be within the knowledge[Pg 70] of every citizen, and it becomes necessary either to induce or to compel citizens not to write of such matters.

But it was not only against the undesigned harm which loyal people might do, that it was necessary to guard. There was good reason to suspect that in Quebec, as well as in New York, there was a considerable proportion of English speaking people who were by no means well affected towards the government, and who would not hesitate to impart to the enemy any information which they thought might be of assistance.

The king, in his instructions to Carleton[110] as governor, enjoined him to signify to the loyal merchants and planters the necessity for caution against allowing their letters to become the means of conveying information to the enemy, and directed him to use every possible effort to frustrate the schemes of the disloyal carried on through the medium of correspondence.

The method employed by the governor to forestall danger from this source was the simple one of standing guard over the channel through which correspondence must ordinarily pass. In this way, he would discover many of the disaffected, and at the same time show such people the danger to them of being implicated in matters of that kind.

To merchants, however, the governor's course was a great inconvenience. All their letters were delayed, and many not delivered at all, for the governor's staff had neither the training in post office work, nor the sense of the importance of mercantile correspondence necessary to assure the merchants of the safety of their letters, when these passed out of the accustomed courses. The merchants remonstrated against the governor's action, and called upon Finlay to assert the determination of the post office to secure respect for the act, which was being violated by the governor.

Finlay was a man of tact, and a member of the governor's executive council as well, and he counselled patience to the merchants. They acquiesced for a time, hoping that the governor's surveillance over their correspondence would be relaxed, but the governor continued firm. Each season as the vessels began to come up the river, orders were issued for the renewal of the unpopular practice.

What took place at Quebec was repeated at New York; and during the short period of the British occupation of Philadelphia, in that city, also. The postmaster of Philadelphia, who had[Pg 71] retired to England when the British office was closed in 1775, returned on hearing that the city was again in the king's hands, but only to find that the letters were delivered to the commander-in-chief, who distributed them not only to the army and navy, but also to the merchants, and no steps were taken to collect the postage.[111]

At that time, and indeed until a quite recent date, the postage on letters was not paid until the delivery of them was effected, and when, as during the war of the Revolution, the mails were diverted from their usual channel, the post office was unable to collect anything to meet the expenses it was incurring.

To-day, owing to the greater cohesiveness among the departments of government, the post office would rest content in the fact that the loss of revenue was due to the action of the government as a whole, and could not be imputed to any failure on its own part, but, at that time, it viewed the situation as a private institution would. The loss of revenue seemed to affect it alone, and again and again the post office declared to the war office that, unless the revenue was maintained, it would be obliged to cut off the internal services between Montreal and Quebec.

There was another matter arising out of the governor's lack of confidence in the English-speaking people in Canada which was a source of much inconvenience to the deputy postmaster general. It has been the practice in Canada to grant exemption to postmasters from the billeting of the troops upon them. The barracks which had been erected in Montreal were destroyed by fire, and it was necessary that the soldiers should be provided for by the citizens. But the duty was grudgingly undertaken, and indeed the disfavour with which the soldiers were regarded in Montreal was one of the chief grounds of complaint on the part of the governors.

Exemption from billeting was an ancient privilege of postmasters. In several of the colonies it was expressly granted, and the continental congress relieved its postmasters from all military duties. In Canada the advantages the post office was able to offer to its postmasters were small and insignificant, and one of the most valued privileges was the assurance of relief from billeting.

The postmaster of Montreal complained to Finlay that, in disregard of the understanding on which he had accepted the postmastership, an officer and his servant had been quartered upon him and he demanded their removal. Finlay, nothing doubting,[Pg 72] laid the postmaster's letter before the governor, who, to Finlay's surprise, took exception to what he termed the extraordinary and peremptory tone of the letter, and commanded Finlay to dismiss the postmaster.[112]

To Finlay this order was a great embarrassment, as suitable postmasters were difficult to find, and, besides, the postmaster had accepted the office merely to oblige Finlay. Finlay laid these facts before the governor and pleaded for a reconsideration, but the governor was inexorable. Carleton relinquished the governorship at this time, and Finlay appealed to Haldimand, who succeeded Carleton, but with no better success.

The post office encountered the same kind of ill-will here as elsewhere from the military authorities. With the greatest vigilance on their part, much correspondence was passing backward and forward of which they could know nothing, and the suspicions natural under the circumstances were heightened by what they knew of the opinions of many of the people.

The regularity of the trips between Quebec and Montreal, which were resumed soon after the Americans had withdrawn from the country, seemed to Haldimand a source of danger. Although there was no large hostile force in the province, affairs were still unsettled, and a mail courier whose movements were known in every detail could easily be waylaid by the marauding parties which infested the long route on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Haldimand would have preferred holding the regular service in suspense until peace was obtained, depending on occasional expresses to maintain necessary communications.

During the year 1777 there was no material change in the situation. When the British occupied New York in the autumn of 1776, the monthly trips between England and New York were resumed. But the activity of the privateers was greatly increased; and while none of the packets on the New York station were taken, the "Swallow" on its way to Lisbon in February was captured by the war vessel which had carried Franklin to France,[113] and the "Weymouth," which was taking the mails from the West Indies was obliged to strike to the "Oliver Cromwell" of New London, a privateer carrying twenty guns and one hundred and fifty-three men.[114]

France, though not at war with England, saw in the revolt of the colonies an opportunity for revenge for late humiliations, and she strained the laws of neutrality to the utmost in her effort[Pg 73] to assist the Americans. Cruisers bearing American names, but armed with French guns, and manned by French sailors ranging the channel, wrought havoc with British merchant shipping, and carried their prizes into the harbours of Normandy and Brittany.

Some regard, however, had to be paid to appearances so long as France had not actually broken with England; and it was not until the alliance between the Americans and the French was consummated in February 1778, that the hands of the French were quite free.

From that time England's position on the sea was changed greatly for the worse, and the record of the packet service was one of almost unbroken disaster. On the 15th of June the packet "Le Despencer" on her way from Falmouth to New York, was set upon by two privateers, the "Nancy" with sixteen guns and one hundred and twenty men, and another having fourteen guns and one hundred and fifteen men. After an hour's fighting, in which his vessel was disabled, the captain of the "Le Despencer" was obliged to yield to superior force.[115]

In September, the "Duke of York," on one of the North American stations, was taken by a French frigate of thirty-six guns;[116] and in the same month, the "Harriott" and the "Eagle," the one bound for New York, and the other for Carolina, both fell as prizes to the "Vengeance," a privateer of twenty guns and one hundred and ten men, belonging to Paul Jones' fleet and commanded by a Frenchman, Captain Ricot.[117]

From the year 1779 until 1782, nine packets on the several North American stations were captured, and seven were more or less seriously damaged. Some idea of the extent to which the packet service was crippled during the war of the Revolution may be gathered from the fact that of the five vessels on the New York station in 1777, four were taken and one damaged. Of the six on the West Indian station, four were taken and one damaged, and of the three on the Carolina station two were taken.[118] The importance of these facts in their influence on the outcome of the war has not so far received the attention the subject merits.

[Pg 74]

A point has now been reached, beyond which the sequence of events in the American post office no longer forms an integral part of the narrative. There had, indeed, been no actual postal connection between Canada and the revolted colonies since the beginning of war. Communication between Quebec, Montreal and New York had been interrupted in May 1775 by the capture of Ticonderoga.

The abandonment of the colonial post office by the home authorities at the end of the same year, left the four post offices on the banks of the St. Lawrence the sole remnants of the system which had extended from Quebec to Georgia. Though Finlay was nominally the associate deputy postmaster general for the district between Canada and the southern boundary of Virginia, his real authority was confined to the service of Quebec, Three Rivers, Berthier and Montreal.

Finlay occupied important positions in the government of the country, from his arrival in the year when Canada fell into the hands of the British, until his death in 1801. His knowledge of the French language procured for him a nomination as justice of the peace, the duties of which office were, owing to the circumstances of the time, delicate and responsible.

Two years after a regular government was established, Finlay was nominated to the legislative council, and a glance over the proceedings of that body will show that he always took an important, and often a leading part in its transactions. He was clerk of the crown in chancery and provincial auditor, and, for a number of years, chairman of the land committee, the duties of which were to superintend the distribution of the crown lands to the settlers, who came into the country in large numbers.

Finlay was much attached to the French Canadians. He became their advocate in council, and incurred some displeasure[Pg 75] on the part of the governor for his pertinacity on their behalf. The maîtres de poste were the objects of his special attention. He endeavoured, though unsuccessfully, to assimilate their position to that of the masters of the post houses in England. As their standing and rights were but roughly defined, they had to endure much hardship and oppression from the ill-nature and rapacity of travellers, and Finlay's championship was of substantial service to them.[119]

When Canada was invaded by the Americans in 1775, Finlay drew up a form of pledge for the maîtres de poste to sign, in which they bound themselves to defend the country from the king's enemies, to give to the government all useful information they might become possessed of, and to render faithful service in the conveyance of the mail couriers. All the maîtres de poste except three signed the engagement.[120]

To Finlay, in truth, the maintenance of the organization of maîtres de poste was indispensable. Without them the mails could not be carried, except at an outlay which the revenues were not able to bear. It has always been the practice of the post office in this country to take advantage of any carrying agencies which might be operating on a route, to secure the transportation of the mails on approximately the same terms as those at which ordinary freight of the same bulk would be conveyed. Thus, by utilizing a stage coach, the cost of conveyance between two towns was a mere fraction of what it would be, if the same conditions of speed and security were required in a conveyance used exclusively for the mails.

In the maîtres de poste Finlay had a transportation agency, which was unexcelled at that period, and by protecting them and confirming to them the exclusive right to provide for passenger travel along the road from Montreal to Quebec, he obtained not only all the ordinary advantages accruing to the public from the operation of this agency, but secured the conveyance of his couriers from stage to stage at half the charge paid by travellers.

Finlay's efforts on behalf of the maîtres de poste were first exerted in the legislative council.[121] He desired to obtain an ordinance defining their duties, and declaring their right to the exclusive privilege of providing horses and vehicles to travellers. Having succeeded in this, he endeavoured to have himself appointed superintendent of the maîtres de poste.[Pg 76]

In this he had to encounter the opposition of the governor who, though personally friendly to Finlay, was unwilling to allow himself to be occupied with the matter, while he was engaged with the more important duty of providing for the defence of the country. Finlay was a man of much persistence, and when he found the governor indisposed to give him the appointment, he sought the aid of the postmaster general, to whom he represented that on his control over the maîtres de poste depended his ability to secure the conveyance of the mails at a reasonable charge.[122]

Governor Haldimand resented the pressure thus brought on him, declaring that the postal service of Canada was quite equal, if not superior, to the service in England. Not long afterwards, however, the governor relented so far as to give Finlay a temporary holding of the position he coveted, and when conditions became settled, his appointment was made permanent.[123]

The stoppage of the service to New York made it necessary to provide otherwise for the maintenance of the connection with Great Britain. While navigation was open on the St. Lawrence occasional visits were made to Quebec by war vessels and merchantmen, and all such opportunities to send mails to England were taken advantage of.

With Halifax, also, communication was opened by means of a vessel which ran from Quebec to Tatamagouche, on the straits of Northumberland, from which point the journey to Halifax was an easy overland trip.[124] During the summer, therefore, communication with Great Britain was maintained without special difficulty. When navigation on the St. Lawrence closed, however, and vessels could no longer reach Quebec, the situation was entirely changed.

Haldimand, in a letter to a friend, written in November 1778, bemoans his isolation. He will receive no news whatever, unless the rebels should manage to get into the province, an eventuality he has done his best to prevent by destroying their supplies on lake Champlain. The only possible means of establishing a winter communication with Great Britain was to send couriers by the inland route to Halifax.

At this period and for a long time afterwards, this route presented many difficulties. It was very long, and at certain seasons the natural obstacles in the way of travel were nearly insuperable. The connecting links between the Maritime provinces and Quebec[Pg 77] were the portages between the waters running into the St. Lawrence and those running into the St. John river. Of those there were several, but the one which was adopted ran from Notre Dame du Portage, a few miles west of River du Loup, in south-easterly direction until it reached lake Temiscouata.

During the French regime, despatches were not infrequently carried between the governor of Quebec and the governor of Louisburg. The courier, who had despatches from the governor of Quebec for Halifax, would travel on foot over a fair road on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, to the portage between Kamouraska and River du Loup. From this point his course ran over the portage between the St. Lawrence and the St. John river systems.

After a toilsome journey of thirty-seven miles over a country alternating between mountains and swamps, the courier reached lake Temiscouata. Having crossed this lake, he came to the entrance of the Madawaska river, which runs due south until it empties into the St. John river. From this point to fort Howe, the site of the present city of St. John, there was a long river journey of two hundred and twenty-eight miles.

The trip from St. John to Halifax took the courier across the bay of Fundy to Annapolis, thence along the Annapolis valley to Windsor, and so on to Halifax. The distance from Quebec to Halifax by this route was six hundred and twenty-seven miles. This route was followed frequently by couriers during the winters of the years of the war of the Revolution.

In 1775, Finlay proposed to introduce some system into the arrangements by having couriers from Quebec and Halifax meet at fort Howe for the exchange of despatches. While the war lasted, the arrangement was to be kept secret. In 1781, the merchants in London who traded to Quebec urged the adoption of this route for a regular winter service, but the danger of having the couriers intercepted by prowling parties of Americans on the long unprotected stretches made it impossible to have more than an occasional trip. The trips, also, cost at least £100 each, a not unimportant consideration in those days.

Finlay's activity as deputy postmaster general was confined to the inland service in Canada, and he gave his attention to improving the conditions under which the service was performed. The state of the roads was a matter which occupied him considerably. They were probably, as Finlay reported, as bad as they could be.[Pg 78]

For many years before Canada passed into the possession of the British, the habitants were fully occupied with the war, and when peace was restored, the roads remained as the war had left them. Work on the roads was never willingly undertaken by the habitants. When Lanoullier constructed the great highway between Montreal and Quebec, it was only by his personal superintendence that he was able to keep the habitant to his task. As soon as his eye was withdrawn the work lagged.

Lanoullier lived until 1751, and during the last few years of his service he failed to maintain the energy that had been an earlier characteristic; and after his death, the country was in a constant state of war, so that even if there had been an efficient grand voyer to succeed him, the general neglect into which the domestic affairs fell must have affected the condition of the roads.

The procedure employed in calling upon the habitants to work upon the roads was that the grand voyer issued an order to the local captains of militia, who published the order to the habitants by notice at the church doors. The grand voyer complained to Finlay that it was impossible to induce the habitants to work upon the roads. When the order was read at the church, the habitants would dismiss the matter with a shrug, and the remark "c'est un ordre anglais."

The consequence of this neglect was seen in the details of Finlay's reports[125] as he travelled from Quebec to Montreal. As he passes from post house to post house, his journals are a monotonous, though indignant, recital of ruts, bogs and rocks.

The roads were unditched, and the bridges dangerous trap holes. The bridges were no more than rows of poles lying crosswise, and scarcely longer than the width of a calèche. When the water rose, the poles were set afloat. The post houses should have been three leagues apart, but the difficulty of inducing the habitants to undertake the irksome and thankless duties of maître de poste, often compelled Finlay to choose persons whose houses were at a considerable distance from where they should have been, and consequently post houses were found quite close together.

There were places where the post houses were no more than one league apart. As a maître de poste could not carry passengers beyond the next adjoining post house, the inconvenience of the frequent changes of horses was very great.

The mail couriers were bound to travel by night as well as by day; and it is not difficult to believe Finlay when he says that the[Pg 79] courier travels by night at the risk of his neck. When other means of obtaining help with the road work failed, Finlay offered to put the road in good condition and keep it so if given the services of twelve soldiers of the German legion, and a grant of £100.

An application was made to Finlay in 1781 for a postal service to the settlements and forts along the Richelieu river. This was one of the most prosperous sections of the country. When Catalogne made his report on the state of Canada in 1712, he was particularly struck with the evidences of comfort in some of the parishes bordering on the Richelieu.

It was not on this account, however, that it was thought necessary to extend to this district the benefits of the postal service. The valley of the Richelieu was the pathway along which travel from lake Champlain pursued its course into the heart of Canada. Settlements were established along the river at different times by French and English to oppose a barrier to incursions from the south.

British forces were stationed in 1761 at St. Johns, Chambly and Sorel; and it was to keep up a communication with these forces that a postal service was desired. The detachments at St. Johns and Chambly received their letters and despatches from Montreal, but as the most important communications were with the governor, whose headquarters were at Quebec, the commandant of the forces in this district, Colonel St. Leger, wished to have a regular exchange with Sorel at the mouth of the river.

Although Sorel was on the south side of the St. Lawrence, it had maintained connection with the couriers on the grand route between Quebec and Montreal, by means of a courier who crossed the river to Berthier, where a post office had been established since 1772. The postmaster general was disinclined to open a route between Sorel and St. Johns, and the military authorities took the matter into their own hands.

The conclusion of peace in 1783 and the recognition of the independence of the United States was immediately followed by the dissolution of the old establishment which administered the postal system of the northern district of North America. The services of Finlay, as deputy postmaster general of that system, ceased forthwith; and in July 1784, he was appointed to the much humbler position of deputy postmaster general of Canada.

Foxcroft, Finlay's associate in the deputyship was made British agent at New York for the packet boat service, which was resumed between Great Britain and the United States. Dashwood,[Pg 80] the departmental secretary of the old establishment, was appointed postmaster general of Jamaica in 1781.[126]

The first question of importance to occupy Finlay under the new order of things was the means by which communication between Great Britain and Canada was thereafter to be carried on. The merchants of Quebec and Montreal hearing that a line of sailing packets was to be re-established between Falmouth and New York,[127] at once demanded that the service between Canada and New York should be restored.

Conditions were not favourable to its resumption. The rancours of the war were not yet abated, and one or two messengers, who were sent down to New York by Finlay, were insulted and maltreated by the Americans. The postmaster general of the United States, Hazzard, also set up difficulties.[128]

Finlay's plan was to have the Canadian mails taken down as far as Albany by his courier, and to pay the American postage on them from Albany to New York. But at this time there were no regular couriers between Albany and New York; and consequently the Canadian mails, having to depend on chance conveyance, would often miss the packet boats for which they were intended. Finlay thought to overcome this difficulty by having his courier take the mails past Albany and on to New York.

Hazzard, however, objected to this plan, and informed Finlay that he would have the courier prosecuted if he attempted to go farther south than Albany. Finlay met this objection, but at a ruinous cost. He arranged with the postmaster at Albany that the Canadian courier should go on to New York, and that at the same time Finlay would pay for this privilege at the rate of three shillings sterling per ounce for the mail, the bag being included in the weight. Thus, if the mail bag weighed twenty pounds—no very great weight—Finlay had to pay £48, the cost of wayleave for his courier to travel from Albany to New York. He had, of course, to pay his courier's expenses as well.

Nor did the situation show a prospect of improvement. The United States perceived that the toll which the Canadian post office would have to pay for leave to pass over their territory might be greatly increased by the simple expedient of establishing a post office near the Canadian boundary, and compelling the Canadian post office to pay a wayleave equal to the ordinary[Pg 81] postage for the distance between that post office and New York, as well as the courier's wages and necessary expenses, for the Americans did not propose to be at any expense in the matter. This scheme would net the Americans four shillings an ounce.

But as has happened so often since in the relations of Canada with her neighbour to the south, the Canadian post office was driven by these oppressive charges to the development of the alternative, though naturally much less favourable, opening to the sea. The distance from Quebec to Halifax by the Temiscouata route was six hundred and twenty-seven miles as against rather less than four hundred miles, which is the distance from Montreal to New York.

The route to New York was the natural highway, which for a century and more had been pursued by Indians, soldiers and travellers on their way from the British American colonies to Canada. On the journey southward from Montreal to New York, there was a good road from Laprairie, opposite Montreal to fort St. John, which was connected by the river Richelieu with lake Champlain.

The trip down the lake from fort St. John to Crown Point (or fort Frederic) was easily and pleasantly made by canoe or bateau. From Crown Point, the traveller had a choice of routes to the Hudson river, which bore him to New York. Kalm, the Swedish naturalist who visited Canada in 1749, entered the country by the route described, and his account of the trip suggests no unusual difficulties.[129]

Before the war the mail couriers from Montreal to New York made the journey in from nine to ten days. The journey to Halifax was of a very different character. At the best it could not be made in less than a month, and during a considerable period at the beginning and the end of each winter season the trip was very arduous and dangerous.

There has been preserved the journal of a courier, Durand, who carried a mail from Quebec to Halifax and back in the early winter months of 1784.[130] His trip downwards, starting on the 11th of January, offered no features unusual in a winter journey, most of which must be made on foot through a country a large part of which was unsettled. He reached Halifax on the 29th of February, seven weeks from starting.

The journey homeward was exceedingly toilsome and dangerous,[Pg 82] and as conditions remained unchanged for many years, at this season when winter was relaxing its hold, it may be worth while to note some of the incidents on the route.

At the Bay du Portage, on the lower St. John, Durand and his three companions broke through the ice, and they with their mails were rescued with difficulty. They managed to get as far as Presqu' Isle, partly on the honeycombed ice, and partly in the woods, when they found themselves face to face with an ice jam. As it was impossible for Durand to land his dogs on the shore, he clambered up the hill of ice, and he and the dogs had to make their way as best they could over the broken heaped-up pieces for twenty miles, when they came upon a stretch of water as clear as in summer.

Durand's guide had abandoned him and taken to the woods, but finding the snow too soft for his snow-shoes, after a league's trudging, he rejoined Durand on the ice. The swift and swollen waters, which they now reached, compelled them to wait till they could build a canoe. Embarking they poled their way for a couple of miles, as the speed of the current prevented rowing, when the ice began again to come down upon them in great masses.

Harnessing their dogs to an Indian cart, they hauled their canoe another stretch, and on the 14th of April they reached Grand Falls. Above the falls the ice, though bad, was firm enough; and having constructed a sled, they carried their canoe and baggage on it for fifteen leagues. From this point onward, although their difficulties were by no means at an end, they struggled on to the St. Lawrence, and reached Quebec on the 24th of April.

The trip was a great disappointment to Finlay. He had no intention of having it made at this time; but Sir John Johnston, superintendent general of Indian affairs, had informed him that he was about to make a trip to Halifax, and would be prepared to take a mail with him. Finlay lost no time in advertising the fact throughout the colony, and had gathered a large number of letters when Johnston changed his plans and did not go to Halifax.

There was nothing for Finlay to do but to send a special courier. Durand whom he engaged could not tell him what the cost would be, but from the figures furnished by another courier who had frequently carried despatches, he thought that £120 would be about the expense. Imagine his dismay when the account was shown to be £191, and he had collected less than £75 as postage on the letters contained in the mail.

There was no choice open to the colony. At whatever cost,[Pg 83] an easy road must be made between Quebec and Halifax. Dependence on a foreign, and, at the time, hostile nation, for communication with the mother country was not to be thought of, still less endured.

Indeed, in January 1783, before the peace was signed, Haldimand had taken steps to establish a road between Canada and Nova Scotia. He sent a surveyor with two hundred men down to work on the Temiscouata portage, and at the same time urged governor Parr of Nova Scotia to do what was necessary to facilitate travel in his province.

Haldimand had observed that a considerable part of the expense of a mail service by this route arose from the extortionate charges for guides and forwarding, which were made by the Acadians settled at Aupaque, a few miles above Fredericton.[131] His plan, therefore, was to gather into his own hands all the agencies for transportation on the route; and with that end in view, he proposed to establish some experienced men at the head of lake Temiscouata, with canoes and other facilities for travel, whose business it should be to convey passengers and mail couriers across the lake, down the Madawaska river, and on down the St. John river as far as Grand Falls, where he intended to settle another post.

From an Acadian courier, named Mercure, whom Haldimand frequently employed to convey despatches to Halifax, he learned that a number of Acadians desired to take up land on the upper St. John, in order that they might be nearer ministers of religion, in the parishes on the St. Lawrence. The plan was to place these Acadians on the lands along the river from Grand Falls up to lake Temiscouata, and it was hoped that the settlement thus formed would extend eventually to the St. Lawrence.

The governor of Nova Scotia responded heartily to Haldimand's proposals, and the settlement, once begun under their united efforts, made rapid progress. When Finlay travelled by this route to Halifax in July 1787, he found no settlers at all on the Madawaska, and only some twenty Acadians huddled together on the south bank of the St. John, opposite the mouth of the Madawaska.[132]

From this point downwards to the Grand Falls, a distance of forty miles, the country was entirely unoccupied. In 1791, a gentleman from Scotland, who was making a tour through Canada remarked with satisfaction on the regularity of the settlement[Pg 84] over an extent of fifty miles of very rich country, and on the evidences of material well-being observable on every side.[133] The people carried the modes of life of a self-dependent community with them, as the traveller says that the settlement was entirely isolated and self-contained, electing its own magistrates, and that a high degree of comfort prevailed.

Governor Carleton, of New Brunswick, who had assisted materially in the formation of the settlement, obtained a troop of soldiers from Lord Dorchester, and by manning the posts at Presqu' Isle, Fredericton and St. John, he provided the means for keeping the road in good order.

The section of the long route between Quebec and Halifax, which commenced at the northern end of the Temiscouata portage, and ended at the mouth of the St. John river, was the one presenting most difficulties. But the other parts of the route, that is, the section between Quebec and the Temiscouata portage, which was entirely within the jurisdiction of the governor of Quebec, and the section from St. John to Halifax, which was partly in New Brunswick, and partly in Nova Scotia, remain to be mentioned.

The courier had a comparatively easy journey from Quebec down the south shore of the St. Lawrence to the entrance of the portage. There had been a fair road for some years through that part of the country, and in 1786 Finlay, by the governor's orders, settled post houses on the route in order to facilitate the travel of mail couriers and others. The gentleman whose travels through Canada have been mentioned, observed that it was a comfortable trip through these parts, and that the country was thickly settled, there being from twelve to sixteen families to the mile.

The eastern end of the long route, that is, the part from St. John to Halifax, consisted of a trip across the bay of Fundy from St. John to Annapolis, and a journey by land through the Annapolis valley from Annapolis to Windsor, thence to Halifax. The road from Annapolis to Halifax is described by Finlay as very rough, but it was covered in three days in a one-horse carriage, and in two days on horseback.

The maintenance of a continuous communication between Quebec and Halifax was effected in the following manner.[134] Canada controlled the section from Quebec to Fredericton, and provided[Pg 85] couriers who made fortnightly trips over this part of the route. The section down the St. John river from Fredericton to St. John, and thence by the bay to Annapolis, was under the supervision of the government of New Brunswick; while the eastern part, which lay entirely in Nova Scotia, was naturally managed by that government. In the summer of 1787, the governor, Lord Dorchester, sent Finlay over the route to Halifax, to see what improvements would be required in order to enable this service to compete with the service over the shorter route from Montreal to New York. Dorchester at the same time submitted the whole scheme to the colonial office, intimating that if the home government saw fit to establish a packet service between England and Halifax, the arrangements for the inland conveyance through the provinces would be found satisfactory.

Lord Sydney, the colonial secretary, expressed the king's approval of the measures taken,[135] and stated that the postmasters general had directed Finlay to carry the plans into execution in a manner correspondent to Lord Dorchester's wishes. The lack of sufficient packet boats would prevent the establishment of a regular service from England for the moment, but it was hoped that vessels enough might be spared for the route, to make the service though not exactly regular yet of substantial benefit to the colonies.

Finlay in the course of his visit to St. John and Halifax found much to encourage the hope that, with the improvement of the route, a satisfactory outlet from Canada to the sea would be obtained at Halifax. The chief trouble, he foresaw, lay in the divided responsibility for the maintenance of an efficient service, owing to the fact that post office authorities in the several provinces were entirely independent of one another. Indeed, at that very time, the deputy postmasters general of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were at strife with one another, and were carrying on an active newspaper war as to which of the two was accountable for certain defects in the service.[136] The distribution of the expense of the part of the service they had undertaken to maintain was another cause of complaint.

Finlay came back to Canada after his trip to Halifax bringing with him two strong convictions. One was that the service to be successful must be in the hands of one person. The other was that the correspondence between the provinces themselves was not of sufficient volume to cover the outlay, and that unless there were[Pg 86] frequent English mails exchanged at Halifax, the service would have to be dropped for lack of revenue to meet the large expense. He considered that if six mails a year could be exchanged between England and Halifax, the postage arising would more than pay the expenses of the service.

Dorchester lost no time in transmitting to England the substance of Finlay's recommendations, adding his own opinion that as soon as a continuous road to St. John had been constructed, and a sufficient number of people had been settled upon it to keep it open in winter, the foot couriers would be replaced by horsemen, and then the mails would be carried more speedily and securely than by way of New York.

The governor, also, suggested that the postal service in all the provinces be put under the direction of Finlay, who was a man of much experience, zeal, and practical ability, and who was entitled to this consideration from having lost a similar appointment by the late war.[137]

The home government approved of Dorchester's recommendation as to Finlay, whose commission as deputy postmaster general was extended to comprise the whole of the colonies in British North America. At the same time Dorchester received the gratifying news that the post office had managed so to arrange matters that commencing with March 1788 the packet boats which ran between Falmouth and New York would pass by way of Halifax, stopping there two days on both the inward and the outward voyages.

The service to Halifax was to be limited, however, to eight monthly trips between March and October, as the admiralty had been informed that the prevailing winds off the Nova Scotia coast during the winter months were so contrary as to make it impracticable for the packets to call there during those months.[138]

In winter, therefore, it was still necessary to send the mails from Canada for England by way of New York. The mails between Nova Scotia and England during the winter months were exchanged by means of a schooner, which the governor of Nova Scotia put on the course between Halifax and New York.

In the winter of 1790, the conditions were made somewhat easier for the Nova Scotians, by the British post office directing that the packet agent at New York should send the Nova Scotia[Pg 87] mails from New York to Boston, so that the governor's schooner was not required to go further south than Boston.

To Canada, the calling of the packet at Halifax, was a great boon. It settled the seaport problem, which had many perplexing aspects. Canada could never dispense with the New York route, unless the charges for transmission through the United States were made quite extortionate, and the success which had attended the efforts of Canada to make an outlet through British territory would not be lost upon the Americans when it became necessary to re-arrange the terms for transit through the United States.

To merchants and others in Quebec who depended exclusively on the Halifax post office for their correspondence with England, the service of the packet boats, curiously enough, developed a grievance, which had a real foundation, as will be seen from the following case.

The postmaster of Halifax reported to the postmaster general that the admiral of the "Leander," which was on the point of sailing for England, expressed much dissatisfaction because a mail was not sent by his ship.[139] In explanation of his refusal to do this the postmaster stated that before the packet boats began to call at Halifax, he made up and despatched a mail by every ship of war and merchantman that sailed from Halifax for England, but since the commencement of the packet service, he despatched no mails by any other vessels than the packets.

The understanding of the arrangement by the postmaster was that the packet boats would not have been sent to Halifax if they were not to be employed exclusively, and he would no more think of sending a mail by any other steamer than he would send the letters to Annapolis by the first traveller who happened to be going in that direction. The explanation was acceptable to both the post office and the admiralty, but there can be no question that the employment of the packet boats curtailed the opportunities which the Nova Scotians had enjoyed of corresponding with England.

Before leaving the Quebec-Halifax service, it seems proper to mention a remarkable scheme which was submitted to the postmaster general by William Knox, late under secretary of state, for a packet service between England and North America, and between the several parts of the latter.[140] Knox was under[Pg 88] secretary of state during the war, and had in a large measure directed the operations of the packet service on behalf of the army in America.

The proposition, which was the result of a request by Lord Walsingham, the postmaster general, for an expression of Knox's views, was based on the sound principle that, until the post office provided facilities adequate to the requirements of the correspondence which passed between England and North America, it could never compete successfully with the number of private ships continually crossing the Atlantic.

Knox pointed out that there was only a monthly service between England, Halifax and New York, and that, at the very best, five months must elapse before an answer could be returned to a letter written in England and addressed to any of the interior parts of British North America.

The plan Knox unfolded to Walsingham was to have a fleet of fast sailing vessels ply between England and Caplin bay, Newfoundland. At Caplin bay there would be other vessels awaiting the British packets, and, on their arrival, one of these would set off with the mails for Halifax and Rhode Island, and another for Bermuda and Virginia, each vessel returning by its own route, to Caplin bay. These services were to be looped together by auxiliary services, and connected with other lines further south, until Great Britain, Newfoundland, Canada, the United States and the West Indies were all bound together by an elaborate system of intercommunication, which would give an exchange of mails, between all the parts three times a month. This scheme, it is needless to say, was never carried into execution.

The results of the war had other important consequences for Canada, besides that of forcing upon Quebec and the Maritime provinces the first of the series of steps in the direction of common action, which led eventually to confederation. When peace was concluded in 1783, the disbanded soldiers and other adherents of the British cause came and settled in Canada, and there was an early demand for postal accommodation in the newly peopled districts.

The first settlement in Upper Canada was at Niagara, where four or five families took up land in 1780. These were reinforced in 1784, by a number of the men of Butler's Rangers, and at the end of that year, the settlement was increased to over six hundred. Americans came over in large numbers, and between them and the steady stream inwards of loyalists, the district from Niagara[Pg 89] to the head of the lake at Hamilton was rapidly settled. A gentleman travelling through that part of the province in 1800 remarked that it was all under settlement.[141]

At the other end of the province, settlement was going forward with much rapidity. From the eastern boundary westward as far as the township of Elizabethtown, near the present site of Brockville, there was a continuous line of settlers. The extreme east was taken up by Highland Scotch as far as Dundas county, and the western part of this county was occupied by Germans. Both Highlanders and Germans came from the same district on the Mohawk river in New York state.

Westward from Dundas county the settlers were more largely of British-American origin. At Elizabethtown there was a break in the settlement until Frontenac county was reached, as the land in that intermediate district did not appear so favourable. At Kingston, settlement was recommended, and from that point to the western end of the bay of Quinte, farms were taken up with an alacrity that was unsurpassed in any part of the province.

The incomers were all from the states to the south, and in their old homes had enjoyed many of the conveniences of civilized life. In 1787, as soon as they had become fairly established, they petitioned the government for the extension of the post office into the new districts, and two years later post offices were opened at Lachine, Cedars, Coteau du Lac, Charlottenburg, Cornwall, New Johnston, Lancaster, Osnabruck, Augusta, Elizabethtown and Kingston.[142]

This was as far as the regular mail couriers ran. Trips were made once a year during the winter, and in summer, every opportunity afforded by vessels going up to lake Ontario, was taken advantage of for the despatch of mails.

In the first advertisement of the service of the new districts, it was stated that the mails would be despatched every four weeks, but this regularity could not be attained without a considerable outlay, and it was found better to utilize such means of conveyance as happened to be offering, for the carriage of the mails. Though the line of post offices along the St. Lawrence terminated at Kingston, reasonable provision was made for communication with the remote settlements of Niagara, Detroit and Michillimackinac.

Detroit and Michillimackinac are in the territory of the United States, but the forts at these places were detained in the hands[Pg 90] of the British until 1796 as security, until the obligations imposed on the Americans by the treaty of Paris were fulfilled. Offices were established in each of the three settlements mentioned, and the post office undertook to send the mails forward from Kingston as opportunities occurred of doing so with safety.[143]

In 1792 the first postal convention to which Canada was a party, was concluded with the United States. Under its terms[144] the United States post office engaged to act as intermediary for the conveyance of mails passing between Canada and Great Britain. When a mail for Canada reached New York by the British packet, it was taken in hand by the British packet boat agent, who after assorting it, placed it in a sealed bag, which he delivered to the New York post office.

The postmaster of New York sent this bag forward by messenger as far as Burlington, Vermont, from whence it was taken to Montreal by a Canadian courier, who travelled between Montreal and Burlington every two weeks. In 1797 these trips were made weekly.

For this service the Canadian post office agreed to pay the United States department the sum which the latter would have been entitled to collect on the same number of United States letters passing between Burlington and New York. As the mails were contained in a sealed bag, the United States post office had no means of arriving at the amount due to them for this service, and they agreed to accept the sworn statement of the British and Canadian officials on this point.

The convention, also, provided for the interchange of correspondence between Canada and the United States. According to the practice of the period, a letter from Montreal for New York, for instance, was chargeable with the postage due for conveyance from Montreal to the United States boundary. This was collected by the Canadian post office. In addition to this, the United States post office charged the postage due to it for the conveyance from the boundary to New York.

The arrangements for the collection of the postage due to each administration were somewhat peculiar. On a letter from Canada to the United States, the Canadian postage as far as Burlington had to be paid at the time the letter was posted. The United States postage was collected from the person to whom the letter was delivered. On letters passing the other way, that is, from the United States to Canada, another arrangement was[Pg 91] possible. The sender could, of course, if he chose, pay the United States postage to Burlington, and the Canadian post office would collect its own postage from the addressed.

But besides this arrangement, which was common to letters passing in either direction, a person in the United States could post a letter for Canada entirely unpaid, and the total amount due would be collected on the delivery of the letter to the person addressed in Canada. In this case, the postage due to the United States was collected by the postmaster at Montreal, who assumed the duties of agent, in this respect, for the United States post office. The United States did not allow any of their postmasters to act as agents for the collection of Canadian postage in the United States, alleging that there were too many post offices in that country for Burlington to look after them properly. The convention of 1792 contained a feature which was at that time novel in post office arrangements. It provided for the conveyance of periodical magazines between Canada and Great Britain, charging for its services the unusually low figure of eight cents a magazine. The convention was signed by the deputy postmaster general of Canada and the postmaster general of the United States.

Under this convention the arrangements for the exchange of correspondence between Canada and Great Britain were very satisfactory. During the eight months when the packet boats called at Halifax, the mails passed by the route through the Maritime provinces. In the winter, while the packet boats did not visit Halifax, the mails were sent by way of New York.

The improvements in the roads on the route through the United States, reduced greatly the time of conveyance between Montreal and New York. Travellers from Montreal to New York in 1800 noted that there was a rough road as far as Burlington, and a rather better one to Skenesborough (Whitehall), while from this place to New York, the journey was made by coach.[145]

In Upper Canada, postal affairs were brought into some prominence when that part of the country was erected into a separate province by the constitutional act of 1791. As will be recalled, the service beyond Kingston was conducted in rather haphazard fashion. It was maintained largely in the interest of the little garrisons at Niagara, Detroit and Michillimackinac.

The first governor of the new province, General Simcoe, was a man of great energy, and zealous in the discharge of any duty laid upon him. The total population in Upper Canada at the[Pg 92] time did not exceed ten thousand. But though these were not neglected, it was in preparation for the thousands whom Simcoe foresaw thronging into the province, that his attention was chiefly occupied.

Before he left London for Canada, Simcoe had written to the government several letters, some of them of great length, discussing every conceivable topic of colonial policy. In submitting the list of officials which he considered necessary for the government of the province, the newly appointed governor stated that he had in mind a proper person who would go to Canada as printer, if he had a salary, and the governor thought that by making this person provincial postmaster[146] as well as government printer, a salary might be raised from the two offices, sufficient to induce him to go.

When Simcoe reached Quebec in November 1791, he consulted with Finlay on the subject, and was confirmed in his opinion as to the desirability of a post office establishment in Upper Canada. There was, however, a preliminary question of great importance which it appeared to him necessary to have settled.

The question was akin to that which formed the subject of a later controversy between the home government and the colonies, as to whether sums collected from the public as postage were to be regarded as a tax, and as such would require the consent of the colonies before they could be appropriated to the use of the postmaster general in Great Britain.

Franklin, it will be remembered, contended that these sums were not a tax, but simply compensation for services rendered by the post office. The government, which founded an argument for the legality of its course in laying taxes in America, on the fact that the colonies had hitherto contentedly paid postage on the letters conveyed by the post office, and made no objection that the profits of the American post office should be sent to England, insisted that the postage collected was a tax.

Simcoe had no doubt on the subject himself. He fully shared the earlier view of the British government, and proceeded to a further discussion of the subject. In 1778, in a belated attempt to stay the progress of the rebellion in the colonies by a course of conciliation, the government, by an act of parliament,[147] renounced the right it had hitherto claimed of taxing the colonies except so far as might be necessary for the regulation of commerce; and[Pg 93] in the case of such regulative duties, the proceeds from them were to ensure to the benefit, not of the home government, but of the colony from which the duties were collected.

Whether a post office tax was to be classed among duties for the regulation of commerce was a point on which Simcoe could not quite make up his mind. But if it were to be so regarded, then by the act of 1778, which was embodied in the constitutional act of 1791, the net produce from the Upper Canadian post office should be appropriated to the use of the province, and the question Simcoe asked was whether it did not lie with the general assembly of the province, rather than with the parliament of Great Britain, to superintend the public accounts of duties so levied and collected.[148] In order that the whole matter might be placed beyond doubt, Simcoe suggested that when a post office bill for the new province came to be drawn up, it should contain a preamble describing its connection with duties for the regulation of commerce, and vesting the collection of the tax in the deputy postmaster general of Lower Canada, who should be made accountable for the revenue so raised, to the legislature of Upper Canada.

Dundas,[149] the home secretary, to whom the matter was submitted, expressed no decided opinion upon it, but suggested that bills of that nature ought not to be passed upon by the governor, but should be reserved in order that the king's pleasure might be signified regarding them.

The question of a separate establishment for Upper Canada, as will be seen hereafter, occupied the attention both of the local government and of the general post office in England, but though several propositions were submitted by both sides, the objections to it were found insuperable.

The only other event of importance occurring in Upper Canada at this period which affected the history of the post office was the founding of the city of Toronto. Until 1794, when the lines of the present city were laid out under the direction of governor Simcoe, and for some years later, the future capital of Ontario[150] was in a state of the most complete isolation.

On the way up lake Ontario, settlement reached no further than the western end of the bay of Quinte. An official sent from York, as Toronto was named in 1792, to Kingston, to meet and[Pg 94] accompany immigrants to York, found very few desirous of going so great a distance from all settlements.

The country to the west of Toronto was equally unsettled. The line of farm holdings from Niagara westward, came to an end at the head of the lake about the site of the present city of Hamilton. From that point to York, the country was occupied by the Mississauga Indians. When it was determined to remove the seat of government to York in 1797, the chief justice complained that the lack of accommodation of any kind was so great that the larger part of those whom business or duty called to York must remain during their stay there, either in the open air, or crowded together in huts or tents, in a manner equally offensive to their feelings and injurious to their health.[151]

The exact date on which the post office was established at York, and the name of the first postmaster are unfortunately not disclosed by the records, which are far from complete. There is a probability, however, which amounts to practical certainty, that the post office was opened in either 1799 or 1800, and that the first postmaster was William Willcocks.

Lieutenant governor Hunter states that in 1799, excepting the single trip made annually from Montreal to Niagara, there was no service beyond Kingston, the mails for the posts west of that point being taken by the king's vessels, and their distribution effected by the commandants at the posts.[152]

In 1800, there was certainly a regular postmaster at York, as the legislative council in that year directed the surveyor general to give Wilcox, the postmaster, such information as would enable Finlay to answer certain questions asked by the governor general respecting the establishment of regular couriers between Quebec and York.[153]

Besides the inhabitants of the rapidly growing town of York, the post office at that place served to accommodate for many years the German settlement in Markham township, which was begun in 1797 under the leadership of Berczy, an enterprising promoter.

In October 1799, Finlay's connection with the post office in Canada ceased, and it is unpleasant to add that he was dismissed as a defaulter. He admitted an indebtedness to the postmaster general, amounting to £1408.

To the lieutenant governor Finlay explained[154] that a large[Pg 95] part of the debt arose in 1794 from the disallowance for a number of years past, of certain items of credit, which had been accepted and passed at the general post office. The death in bankruptcy of the postmaster at Three Rivers increased considerably the amount of Finlay's obligations to the postmaster general.

Finlay pointed out, with truth, that he had not only successfully maintained the post office in Canada under very trying circumstances, but that through the relations he had established with the maîtres de poste, he had saved to the postmaster general not less than £12,000. He pleaded, therefore, that as large an allowance as possible be made, on account of these considerations, and that he might be given time to pay any balance which might thereafter be found due.

Finlay's plea was strongly supported by the leading merchants in the colony, and by the lieutenant governor, who represented that he was the oldest servant of the crown in Canada, being senior executive and legislative councillor. When the land committee was formed he was made chairman, and on him fell practically all the onerous duties devolving on the committee during that period. He was seventy years of age, forty of which had been spent in the service of the colony, and was suffering from an incurable disease, from which he died not long after his dismissal.

Notwithstanding these pleas, judgment was obtained for the amount of the debt, and some land which had been granted to him in Stanstead county as a special recognition of his services, was attached by the orders of the postmaster general. Either the claim was not pressed rigorously, or the land did not suffice to cover the debt, for after standing on the departmental books as uncollectable for many years, Finlay's debt was finally wiped off in 1830.

[Pg 96]

George Heriot, who succeeded Finlay, had been a clerk in the board of ordinance for many years before his appointment as deputy postmaster general. He was a man of some literary ability, his history of Canada which was published in 1801 being a high-priced item in catalogues of Americana. Of Heriot's zeal and intelligence the general post office had no reason to complain, but he had a sensitive self-esteem, which was a most unfortunate possession as matters then stood.

Ordinarily, personal characteristics such as these would call for no mention, but the relations between the post office and the provincial authorities at this time were so difficult that the utmost tact on the part of the deputy postmaster general would scarcely gain more than a tolerable success. The position of the deputy postmaster general towards the governor and the legislatures was peculiar.

As an official of the general post office in London, he was subject to the orders of the postmaster general and to no other authority whatever. Neither the governors nor the legislatures had the least right to give him instructions. Although the postal service was indispensable to the conduct of the official and commercial transactions of the colony, and its maintenance in a state of efficiency a matter of first importance to the colony, the power of the colonial authorities went no further than the submission of their views and desires to the postmaster general or to his deputy in Canada.

To a community jealous of its rights of self-government, the situation was irritating enough, but the natural annoyance might have been largely relieved by an appreciative regard, on the part of the post office, for the wants of the rapidly increasing settlements. This, however, was the last trait the post office was likely to show at this period.

The post office was subordinate to the treasury, a relationship[Pg 97] it never permitted itself to disregard. The deputy postmaster general was under strict injunctions not to enter upon any scheme for the extension or improvement of the postal service, unless he was fully satisfied that the resulting expense would be covered by the augmented revenue. Each application for improvement in the service was dealt with from this standpoint.

The fact that the service in any part of the country was very profitable to the post office was held to be no justification for applying any portion of the profits to make up the deficiencies of revenue in districts less favourably situated. On one occasion, where the needs in some new districts in course of settlement appeared to Heriot to demand special consideration, he directed that for a time the whole of the surplus revenue from Upper Canada should be applied to extensions and improvements. When his action was reported to the postmaster general, it was promptly disavowed, and he was compelled to cancel the arrangements he had made.[155]

A policy of this kind was ill-adapted to colonies, which were steadily expanding by the implanting of small, widely-separated communities, and the man on whom devolved the duty of carrying on a postal service under these conditions had no easy task. Finlay had certain advantages as a member of the legislative council which Heriot did not enjoy, and moreover his difficulties were not so great.

It was only after Finlay had ceased to be deputy postmaster general that the settlements in Upper Canada began to insist on a regular postal service; and in cases where demands were made upon him which his instructions forbade him to grant, he could always depend on the good will of his associates in the council to relieve him from unreasonable pressure. As superintendent of post houses, his influence with the maîtres de poste enabled him to keep the cost of their services on the main routes at a low figure.

Although Finlay's connection with the post office was terminated under disagreeable circumstances, no attempt was made to deprive him of his provincial appointments, which he held until his death at the end of 1801. Heriot then lost no time in applying to be appointed to the vacancy in the legislative council, and to the superintendency of post houses. He was successful in neither case.

Heriot was uniformly unfortunate in his relations with the[Pg 98] governors of the colony. His self-assertiveness irritated those who were accustomed to look for nothing but deference from the persons about them. Heriot seems to have accepted the decision as respects the council as final. But he made a strong effort to force the hand of lieutenant governor Milnes with regard to the post houses. He appealed to the postmaster general in England, who made representations to the colonial office in the matter.

The post office had already begun to feel the inconvenience of separating the control of the maîtres de poste from the office of the deputy postmaster general, as these officials declined to continue to carry the mail couriers on terms more favourable than those granted to the ordinary travelling public.

The colonial office was inclined to the post office view on the subject, but the lieutenant governor was firm in maintaining the position he had taken. The maîtres de poste, he stated, were habitants who possessed, each of them, a small property which rendered them quite independent. Their service, which was to carry passengers on the king's road, was an onerous one, and the advances in the price of the articles of life, coupled with the fact that their exclusive privilege was systematically disregarded, made them reluctant to take the appointments.

Men of this kind, Milnes declared, required management as they would not submit to coercion. Finlay through his personal influence with the maîtres de poste had managed to obtain the conveyance of the mails at sixpence a league, which was only half the charge made to the public for the same service. For some time before his death, Finlay had difficulty in inducing the maîtres de poste to continue this favourable arrangement, and on his death they refused to work under it any longer.

The maîtres de poste had the full sympathy of the lieutenant governor who saw no reason for the discrimination in favour of the post office. Although he endeavoured to obtain a favourable arrangement for the mail couriers, he considered it would be most impolitic on the part of the post office to insist on continuing to occupy their position of advantage.

But valuable as the post house system was in the early period of the country's growth, it soon had to yield to a higher class of travelling facility. As travel in the colony increased the two-wheeled calèches drawn by a single horse and barely holding two persons would no longer do. The changes at the post houses, every hour or little more, with the long delays while the horses were secured and harnessed, were very wearisome. Before Heriot's[Pg 99] term expired, stage coaches had been placed on the principal roads.

In leaving the old system and its ways, it will be interesting to record the impressions of Hugh Gray, an English gentleman, who travelled from Quebec to Montreal in 1806.[156] The mode of travel, he said, would not bear comparison with that in England, and the inns were very far from clean, but he found many things to lighten the hardships of travel in Canada. If, leaving England aside, he compared the accommodations in Canada with those in Spain, Portugal, or even in parts of France, he found the balance in favour of Canada.

The politeness and consideration Gray received at the inns in Canada offset many inconveniences. Often on the continent, after a day of fatiguing travel, sometimes wet and hungry, he was obliged to carry his own luggage into the inn at which he had arrived and see, himself, that it was put in a place of safety. But in Canada he was charmed with the politeness and urbanity with which he was welcomed at every inn: "Voulez-vous bien, Monsieur, avoir la complaisance d'entrer; voilà une chaise, Monsieur, asseyez vous, s'il vous plait."

"If they had the thing you wanted," continued Gray, "it was given to you with a good grace; if they had not they would tell you so in such a tone and manner as to show they were sorry for it." "Je n'en ai point. J'en suis mortifié." "You saw it was their poverty that refused you, not their will. Then if there was no inn to be had, you were never at a loss for shelter. There was not a farmer, shopkeeper, nay, nor even a seigneur or country gentleman who, on being civilly applied to for accommodation, would not give you the best in the house and every accommodation in his power."

The determination of the lieutenant governor to hold Heriot at arm's length, and allow him no part in the local government was unfortunate, as it prevented the mutual understanding between the colonial authorities and the post office which must have been beneficial to both. Heriot made several later efforts to secure the control of the maîtres de poste, but always without success.

The principal feature of Heriot's administration was the establishment of a regular mail service to the settlements in Upper Canada. The single opportunity for the exchange of correspondence afforded by the post office authorities during the many months when navigation was closed was absurdly inadequate to[Pg 100] the needs of the rapidly increasing province. The courier set out from Montreal in January of each year, travelling on foot or snow-shoes with his mail bag slung over his shoulder. He did very well when he covered eighteen miles a day. The journey to Niagara, with the return to Montreal, was not accomplished until spring was approaching, three months later.

The lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, General Hunter, was anxious to improve the communication in that province, and opened correspondence with Heriot on the subject.[157] Heriot laid the lieutenant governor's proposition before the postmaster general with his warm commendation. He pointed out that the rapid increase in the population, the salubrity of the climate, and the fertility of the soil, all encouraged the belief that Upper Canada would soon become one of the first of the British settlements in North America.

General Hunter, Heriot also reminded the postmaster general, had in course of construction a road from the bay of Quinte to York, which in a few months would allow of easy travel by any of the common conveyances of the country. More, his excellency when informed of the views held by the post office on proposals involving expenditure, readily undertook that the province should make up any deficiency arising from the carrying of his schemes into execution.

This was the first considerable proposition submitted by Heriot since his appointment, and the postmaster general made it the occasion of an admonition as to the considerations Heriot should have in mind in dealing with a proposition of that kind. He sent extracts of letters addressed to Finlay on the question of establishing new posts, pointing out that they served to show that unless any new proposition had for its object both the public convenience and the interests of the revenue, it was not to be encouraged.

The system of posts, the postmaster general went on to say, might be made, comparatively speaking, as perfect in Canada as in Great Britain, but the question was, would the board as a board of revenue be justified in so doing when the amount of the revenue was so trifling. However, he directed Heriot to report fully on the several aspects of the lieutenant governor's proposition, not overlooking the general's offer of indemnification in the event of the postage not amounting to sufficient to defray the expense.

The lieutenant governor having repeated his assurance that[Pg 101] any insufficiency in the revenue to meet the additional expense would be made up from the provincial treasury, Heriot set about improving the service—but cautiously. At that time he contented himself with providing monthly instead of yearly trips to Upper Canada during the winter. In summer he continued to depend on the occasional trips of the bateaux on the river and the king's ships on the lake.

In order to assist Heriot, who had some difficulty in procuring the services of suitable couriers for the winter trips, the lieutenant governor directed the commandants at Kingston and York to place trusty soldiers at the disposal of the post office.

There were few letters carried during this period except for the public departments, and they found it less expensive to employ a messenger of their own to visit the several posts and take the bulky accounts and vouchers which constituted the greater part of their correspondence, than to utilize the services of the post office. When it was pointed out to the lieutenant governor that by his failure to employ the post office, he was setting a bad example to the inhabitants who used every means to evade the postmaster general's monopoly, the lieutenant governor agreed to have the correspondence from the outposts carried by the mail couriers.

The territory served by the regular post office did not extend beyond Niagara. But at Amherstburg, the western end of lake Erie, and over two hundred miles beyond Niagara, there were a military post and the beginnings of a settlement, which it was desirable to provide with the means of communication.

During his visit to Niagara in 1801, Heriot devised a plan[158] for this purpose, which appears to have contained all the advantages of a regular postal service, with the charges so much less than the ordinary postage rates as to give the people of the district cause to regret the advent of the regular postmaster and mail courier.

Heriot proposed that the postmaster of Amherstburg should receive letters for despatch, and, from time to time as one of the vessels on the lake happened to be going to fort Erie, at the eastern end of the lake, make up a bag, seal it with the official seal, and deliver it to the captain of the vessel.

At fort Erie the bag was to be placed on one of the flat-bottomed bateaux, which traded between that village and Chippewa and the Niagara river. Between Chippewa, Queenstown and Niagara, on the Niagara portage, there were stage coaches running, and[Pg 102] the bag was taken to Niagara by this means. If the letters were intended for places beyond Niagara, they were put into the regular post office at that point.

This arrangement was quite as safe and expeditious as the postal service between Niagara and Kingston, and yet the charges were very much less than if the letters had been carried the same distance within the authorized system. The ordinary postage on a letter from Amherstburg to fort Erie by land would be tenpence. Heriot did not consider that he could properly charge more than twopence a letter. From fort Erie to Niagara the postage would have been fourpence, which was the rate Heriot proposed to charge.

The question will arise, in what regard this scheme differed from the ordinary postal arrangements, the charges for which were fixed by statute. The point of difference lay simply in this, that Heriot did not propose to administer the oath of office to the courier, who effected the transportation of the mails from Amherstburg to Niagara. There would be none but trustworthy men employed to look after the mails, and the couriers were under effective supervision in the fact that the postmaster in making up the mail enclosed with it a certificate as to the number of letters in it, which the receiving postmaster verified before the courier was paid for his services.

Heriot's scheme, then, was identical with the ordinary arrangements in all respects but one, and that one was purely formal. Heriot's scruples would lead one to suspect a desire to show how excessive the ordinary charges were.

There was no change in the arrangements for the postal service in Upper Canada until 1810, though before that date there had been some agitation for improvements. In 1808, the legislative assembly requested that a regular service be established through the year, instead of monthly trips during the winter merely.

Further representations were made on the insufficiency of the existing service, and in 1810 Heriot provided fortnightly trips throughout the year between Montreal and Kingston, but owing to the badness of the road beyond Kingston, he was unable to give a regular service to York except in the winter. During this period, however, the trips between Kingston and York were made fortnightly.

Efficient roadmaking throughout Canada was attended with many difficulties, owing to the great stretches of land which were in the hands either of the crown or held as clergy reserves or[Pg 103] which were held by speculators. These absentee holders were not bound by the obligation which lay on the residents to make and maintain good roads through their property, and consequently, even where roads were made by the government through the province, they soon fell into disrepair in those districts, where there were no resident owners to keep them up.

General Hunter in 1800 and 1801 had a road made from Kingston to York, and then on to Ancaster, near Hamilton, where it connected with the road to Niagara, but at their best such roads were little more than bridle paths through the woods. In the autumn of 1811 Heriot yielded another step and placed couriers fortnightly on the road from Kingston to Niagara by way of York. He also arranged for a courier to go to Amherstburg or Sandwich as often as commercial requirements demanded it.

Heriot at this time took a step which drew upon him the sharp attention of the home authorities. He directed the postmaster at York to hold the surplus revenue from the western part of the province instead of sending it to Quebec for transmission to England, and to apply it to improving the arrangements in that section of the province.

The secretary of the general post office expressed a doubt as to whether the whole of the revenue should have been applied towards improving the service, and intimated that approval of his action should be held for the postmaster general. Shortly after, Heriot was informed that his action had not been approved, and that it would be necessary to cancel his instructions to the postmaster of York.[159]

This incident fairly illustrates how far Heriot's hands were tied by orders from home, and how little he deserved the censures so freely meted out to him for his unwillingness to provide the country with a system of communication adequate to its requirements. In yielding to any extent to the reasonable demands of the provincial authorities, he was courting disapproval and even reprimand from his superiors.

But in spite of the determination of the postmaster general that no expenditure should be made for postal service, which did not promise an immediate return equal to or greater than the outlay, the country was growing too rapidly to permit of any great delay in providing increased facilities for correspondence. While the post office held on to the monopoly in letter carrying, it had to make some sort of provision for doing the work itself.[Pg 104]

In 1815, when peace had been concluded with the United States, Sir Gordon Drummond, the commander of the forces, and administrator of Canada, directed Heriot to arrange for two trips a week between Montreal and Kingston, Heriot invited tenders for this service, and was dismayed to find that the lowest offer was for £3276, an amount double the anticipated revenues.

With his instructions from the postmaster general before him, an outlay of that magnitude was not to be thought of, but Heriot did go the length of authorizing weekly trips over the whole route between Montreal and Niagara and arranged for fortnightly trips to Amherstburg from Dundas, a village on the grand route between York and Niagara.[160] The mails were carried between Montreal and Kingston by coach; between Kingston and Niagara on horseback or by sleigh; and between Dundas and the settlements at the western end of lake Erie on foot.

In reporting these arrangements to the postmaster general, Heriot explained that, with the close of the war, military expresses had been discontinued, and it became necessary to provide additional accommodation to the commissariat and other military departments, but the increased postage more than covered the expense incurred.

In March 1816 the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada pressed for further improvements in order to facilitate communication between the several courts of justice and every part of the province, so that notices might be sent to jurors and others having business with the courts.[161] In concluding his letter to the general post office recommending the application of the lieutenant governor, Heriot added that there was a strong desire on the part of influential people in Upper Canada that there should be a deputy postmaster general for that province, as well as one for Lower Canada.

Heriot favoured the idea and recommended William Allan, postmaster of York for the position. The postmaster general, however, disapproved of the proposal of an independent deputy for Upper Canada. He agreed with Heriot that there would be advantages in having an official residing in Upper Canada with a wider authority than that ordinarily exercised by a mere postmaster, but thought that the postmaster of York might without change of title be made to answer all the requirements of an assistant to the deputy postmaster general.

Before leaving the service in Upper Canada, an incident should be mentioned, showing the difficulties military men stationed[Pg 105] far from a post office had in corresponding with Great Britain. At the end of the campaign of 1813 in the Niagara peninsula, the officers of the right division, which was quartered at Stoney Creek, presented a memorial to the governor general laying before him their hard case, and praying for relief.[162] They desired to write to their friends and relatives at home, but could not do so, owing to the post office regulation which required that all letters sent to Great Britain should have the postage paid on them as far as Halifax.

The sea postage did not require to be paid, as that could be collected from the person receiving the letter, but unless the letter was fully paid to Halifax, it was detained and returned to the writer. As the nearest post office in operation was York, nearly fifty miles away, and as they had no acquaintance there or at Montreal or Quebec, who might pay the postage for them, they were without the means of relieving the anxiety of their parents, wives and others who could not learn whether they were alive or not. They asked that a bag be made up monthly, as Lord Wellington did from Portugal, and sent free of expense to the Horseguards in London, from which place the letters might be carried to the post office for delivery.

The postal service in Lower Canada and eastward underwent no change from the time of Heriot's accession to office until the war of 1812. As in 1800, the couriers between Montreal and Quebec still left each place on Monday and Thursday mornings, and meeting at Three Rivers, exchanged their mails, and returned, reaching their points of departure two days later. The mails between Quebec and Fredericton continued to be exchanged fortnightly in summer, and monthly in winter, and between Fredericton and St. John, and St. John and Halifax, there were weekly exchanges as in Finlay's time.

Lower Canada still found its principal outlet to Great Britain in the weekly mail carried between Montreal and one of the towns of the United States near the Canadian boundary. In 1810, the place of exchange of mails between Lower Canada and Boston and New York was Swanton, a small town in Vermont.

But, though the service arrangements remained unchanged, they by no means escaped criticism. In 1810, Sir James Craig, the governor general, complained of the slowness of the communication with the United States and with the Maritime provinces.[163] Letters from New York seldom reached Quebec in less[Pg 106] than fifteen or sixteen days, and it usually took a month for the courier to travel from Halifax to Quebec.

For the course of the post from New York, the governor was not disposed to blame Heriot entirely, as he knew the connections from New York to Swanton to be faulty, but he thought that, by a little exertion, Heriot could do much to remedy the defects. As for the movement of the couriers between Quebec and Halifax, the governor had been informed by certain London merchants that the journey could be made in six days. He would not insist on a speed equal to that, but sixteen or seventeen days ought to be easily within the capacity of the couriers.

Dealing with the Quebec-Halifax complaint first, Heriot was aware that the journey from Halifax to Quebec had been made in six days, but as the distance was six hundred and thirty-three miles, three hundred and sixty-eight of which could not be travelled by horse and carriage, he regarded the trip as an extraordinary performance. The circumstances, however, were unusually favourable. The weather was at its best, and no expense was spared to make the journey as rapidly as possible.

But it was useless, Heriot insisted, to compare speed of that kind with that which was within the power of a courier who had to carry a load sometimes weighing two hundred pounds on his back, for a distance of forty miles, after having rowed and poled up rivers and across lakes for two hundred miles. If the contractor was able to disregard considerations of expense, and employ as many couriers as could be done with advantage, much time might doubtless be saved.

Heriot was sure there were no grounds for believing that there would be any material increase in the revenue as the result of such expenditure. The commerce between the Canadas and the Maritime provinces was so trifling that it was all carried on by three or four small coasting vessels. Indeed, were it not for the correspondence between the military establishments, it would be better to drop regular trips between Quebec and Halifax, as the British mails could be carried much more cheaply and with greater celerity by expresses.

The connection with New York offered matter for criticism, but Heriot could not be reproached for remissness in this regard. He had proposed to the authorities at Washington that his couriers should carry the mails all the way between Montreal and New York, offering to pay the United States just as if their couriers had done the service within their territory, but the United States[Pg 107] department would not entertain the proposition. He had also endeavoured, without success, to have the British mails landed at Boston during the winter months, instead of at New York. If this could have been accomplished, there would have been a considerable saving in the time required for the delivery of the British mails at Montreal and Quebec.

The war of 1812 had noticeable effects on the postal service. The mails passing between Quebec and Halifax had to be safeguarded against attack on the part of hostile parties from across the border and against privateers, who infested the lower waters of the St. John river and the bay of Fundy.

From the time the courier on his way eastward left the shores of the St. Lawrence, he was in danger of surprise. The portage between the St. Lawrence and lake Temiscouata was wild and uninhabited, and it would have been an easy matter for the enemy to waylay the courier if he travelled unprotected. When he reached the St. John river his course lay along the United States border. Indeed a considerable part of his route lay in territory which was afterwards adjudged by the Ashburton treaty to belong to the United States.

Heriot facilitated the couriers' journey over the portage by placing twenty-two old soldiers with their families at intervals on the route. They were supplied with arms, ammunition and rations, as the country was so mountainous, sterile and inhospitable, that no man could derive a subsistence from the soil. The couriers on entering the portage were, also, accompanied by an escort of two soldiers, who travelled with them as far as the Madawaska settlement. From that point downwards, the local captains of militia had orders to render all needful assistance and protection to the couriers.

At Fredericton an entire change was made in the route. The route had till then followed the course of the St. John river to the city of St. John, from which place the couriers were taken across the bay of Fundy to Annapolis, in a small sloop. In order to avoid the chances of capture on the water stretches or in the bay, the couriers were sent across the country through the centre of the province to Cumberland, as Amherst was then called, and thence on to Halifax.

This arrangement left St. John unprovided with connection with either Quebec or Halifax, but it was brought into the scheme by a separate courier who met the couriers on the main route at Sussexvale. The travel on the new route was at first very bad,[Pg 108] but the lieutenant governors of the two Maritime provinces, who were interested in the success of the scheme, promised to do their best to induce their assemblies to put the roads in good condition.

In changing the route from Fredericton to Halifax, and requiring the couriers to travel inland, instead of along the waterways, the deputy postmaster general was taking a measure in the direction of safety, but those who had a particular interest in the transmission of their correspondence intact could not look without concern at the exposure of the mails on the long stretch between the foot of lake Temiscouata and Fredericton.

The lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia and the admiral of the Halifax station were both uneasy at the possibility of their despatches being intercepted by the Americans, and grasped eagerly at a suggestion thrown out that the courier from Halifax should not go to Fredericton at all, but on leaving Amherst should pursue a north-westerly course till he reached the Matapedia river at the western end of the bay of Chaleurs. From this point, the route would lie across the bottom of the Gaspe peninsula to the St. Lawrence near Metis.

The suggested route encountered the strong opposition of Heriot.[164] "The heights of the interior," he declared, "are more elevated than those towards the sea, and some of them with snow on their summits which remain undissolved from one year to the other. The land between the mountains is probably intersected by rugged defiles, by swamps and by deep and impracticable gullies. A region so inhospitable and desolate as from its interior aspect, and its latitude as this may without exaggeration be conceived to be, can scarcely be visited by savages. Suppose a road were cut through this rugged desert, it would not be possible to find any person who would settle there, and no courier could proceed on foot for a journey of some hundred miles, through a difficult and dreary waste alike destitute of shelter and of the prospect of assistance."

Heriot's conviction was that the present route was the only possible one, and if the enemy threatened to cut off communications, it might be necessary to establish two additional military posts, one at the head of the Madawaska settlement, the other between Grand Falls and Presqu' Isle.

A blockhouse at each point, with a non-commissioned officer, a few privates and two savages attached, would in Heriot's opinion afford sufficient protection. The enemy would scarcely incur the[Pg 109] trouble and expense of marching one or two hundred men from an immense distance to take or destroy these forts with the precarious and doubtful prospect of interrupting a courier, to whom the nature of the country presented a variety of means of eluding their utmost vigilance.

The idea of establishing a route between Nova Scotia and the St. Lawrence, which would follow the northern shore of New Brunswick, was not carried into effect at once, but as will be seen it occupied attention from time to time and was eventually realized.

The war affected the postal service in Lower Canada to the extent of causing the conveyance of the mails between Montreal and Quebec to be increased from twice a week to daily.[165] Sir George Prevost having pointed out to Heriot the necessity for more frequent communication on account of the war, the latter expressed his willingness to increase the trips, but stipulated that the men employed in the service should not be subject to enlistment as it was very difficult to secure trustworthy men.

The governor agreed, and directed the colonels of militia that they were to impose no military duties on post office employees. On the conclusion of the war, the couriers' trips were reduced from six to five weekly, at which frequency they remained for many years.

The last year of Heriot's administration was marked by a disagreeable quarrel with Sir Gordon Drummond,[166] who was administrator of Canada on Prevost's retirement. In the beginning of 1815, the legislature of Upper Canada adopted an address pointing out that the postal arrangements were very defective, and expressing the opinion that the revenue from Upper Canada was ample to meet the additional expense necessary to put the service on a satisfactory footing. If an efficient service were provided, and it turned out that they were wrong in their anticipation of increased revenues, they were prepared to pay higher rates of postage.

Herein lay a difficulty for the postmaster general. The postal charges in Canada were the same as those in Great Britain, and were collected by the authority of the same act of parliament. The postmaster general was not free from doubts as to the legality of the proceedings of the post office in taking postage in Canada, and he did not wish to raise the question by the enactment of a special act for Canada. He intimated to Heriot his disinclination to bring the question into prominence in Canada, and asked[Pg 110] Heriot to give his mind to the proposition for an improvement in the service.

About the time the letter from the postmaster general containing this instruction reached Heriot, Drummond himself wrote to Heriot, drawing attention to the shortcomings in the service, expressing his conviction that the necessary improvements would lead to enhanced revenues, and concluding with an intimation that unless he were provided with adequate facilities for communicating with that part of his command which was in Upper Canada, he would be obliged to restore military expresses.

Sir Gordon Drummond's services to Canada during the war were such as to entitle him to an honourable place in the memory of Canadians, but he did not appear at his best in his controversy with Heriot. He exhibited too much of that arbitrariness and impatience with other people's views which is commonly observed among military chiefs.

Heriot replied promptly to the governor's letter, stating that he had invited tenders for a semi-weekly service between Montreal and Kingston, and that the offers he received were quite beyond any possible revenue to be derived from the service. He had, however, accelerated the existing service by having the couriers travel on horseback, the horses being changed at convenient distances along the route.

As regards the service beyond York, Heriot directed the postmaster of York to arrange for a regular weekly courier to Niagara, and to set about securing a postmaster at Amherstburg to replace the former incumbent, who had resigned. Heriot wound up his letter by stating that he would have been particularly gratified if he had the power to meet his excellency's wishes in every point, but expressed his regret that his instructions obliged him to act on principles of economy.

The letter was courteously expressed, and showed an evident desire to go as far as his instructions would allow, in meeting the governor's wishes. But Drummond was not satisfied. His wrath rose at the appearance of opposition. In repeating his views that increased revenue would follow upon improvements in the service, he declared that the existing arrangements were slovenly and uncertain, and, in the opinion of merchants, insecure. Moreover, he did not believe that Heriot's instructions were intended to be injurious to the interests of Upper Canada.

Drummond then most unreasonably found fault with Heriot for leaving to Allan the duty of attending to the requirements[Pg 111] of Niagara and Amherstburg, when his excellency had ordered Heriot to give the matter his personal attention. Heriot's time was very fully occupied at Quebec with the ordinary duties of his office, a fact of which Drummond could not have been ignorant; and to order him to leave these duties, and make a journey to the western end of the province, involving a travel of scarcely less than twelve hundred miles, to do a piece of work which any subordinate in the district could do equally well, argued either an indifference as regards the daily calls upon Heriot's time, or a determination to annoy him, either of which was discreditable to the governor general.

Heriot was steadily respectful, however, but maintained that with the powers entrusted to him it was impossible to meet Drummond's views. He cited the incident of 1812, when his recommendation that the whole of the revenue from Upper Canada should be expended on extensions and improvements had been disapproved, and the arrangements founded upon these suggestions had to be cancelled. As for his employment of Allan to secure a postmaster at Amherstburg, Allan knew the district while he himself did not, and in his circumstances he was compelled to rely upon his officials as he did in the west and at Halifax.

The whole of the case was laid by Heriot before the postmaster general. His situation, he declared, was very disagreeable, as people seemed to imagine that he had carte blanche as to the disposal of the post office revenue. Every governor on coming to Canada assailed Heriot with his particular scheme for improvement. Prevost, who had come from the governorship of Nova Scotia, insisted on a large expenditure on the service in that province. Drummond, whose interests lay in Upper Canada, was peremptory in regard to the claims of that part of the country. The consequence of all this was correspondence always lengthy and frequently unpleasant.

What Heriot desired to know was whether his conduct was approved or condemned by his superiors. The official silence left him in uncertainty and suspense. Heriot concluded by asking to be relieved of the office and to be allowed some remuneration for past services.

After a short lull, trouble broke out afresh, and this time Drummond managed to put Heriot clearly in the wrong. A very sharp letter from the governor drew from Heriot the reply that the deputy postmaster general in Canada was governed by several acts of parliament, and by instructions from the general post office,[Pg 112] and he was not subject to any orders, but through the secretary of the post office. He would, however, afford every necessary information when applied to in the mode of solicitation or request.

This was not the tone to take in addressing the chief executive in the colony; and the governor promptly laid the whole matter before the colonial secretary, condemning Heriot for his incapacity, insubordination and insolence, and declaring that nothing but the fear of embarrassing the accounts prevented him from instantly suspending Heriot. He urged his dismissal.

A fortnight later Drummond reported further grievances. Indeed, Heriot seems now to have cast prudence as well as respect for the governor's office to the winds. The governor had demanded to see the postmaster general's instructions to Heriot, and it was not until the demand had been twice repeated that Heriot saw fit to obey.

Among those instructions was one directing the deputy postmaster general to keep the orders of the postmaster general and the table of rates in his office, for his own guidance, and for the satisfaction of all persons desiring to see them. This Drummond insisted on reading as a direction to the deputy postmaster general to make all his communications from the postmaster general public, and he dilates on the disrespect of Heriot in withholding from the governor what he is under orders to disclose to the first comer.

All this is, of course, manifestly disingenuous, and does not impose on Heriot's superiors in the general post office. The secretary of the general post office in discussing Drummond's complaints, has words of commendation for Heriot's zeal and alacrity. He always considered Heriot a judicious, active and efficient officer. Governors, he affirmed, too commonly entertain the idea that the whole revenue of the post office should be devoted to extending the communications. Whatever view might be held as to the principle, Heriot at all events was precluded by his instructions from acting upon it without the express authority of the postmaster general.

While Heriot had, beyond question, given ample grounds for irritation on Drummond's part, it should be remembered, in dealing with the demand for Heriot's dismissal, Drummond was told that he had been sixteen years in the service, and had on many occasions received the thanks of the board. It might be sufficient to enjoin upon Heriot a more respectful attitude towards[Pg 113] the governor, and consult with him as to the extension of communications, and the interests of the revenue.

The postmaster general concurred in the secretary's views. But the quarrel was now past mending, and when after repeated requests to be relieved, Heriot declared that no motive of interest or advantage could induce him to stay in the service longer than was necessary to appoint his successor, the postmaster general decided to accept his resignation.

[Pg 114]

On Heriot's retirement, a number of London merchants who traded to Canada, recommended that the postmaster of Montreal, Daniel Sutherland, be appointed as his successor, and the appointment was made in April 1816.[167] Sutherland entered upon his duties with full knowledge of the postal service in Canada, as he had been postmaster of Montreal since 1807.

An effort was made at this time to remove the headquarters of the department from Quebec to Montreal, but it was not encouraged. The postmaster general was of opinion that, although there were no direct official relations between the governor general and the head of the postal service, it would be inadvisable to diminish in any way the opportunities that then existed of enlisting the good will of the governor towards the post office by the pursuit of a more tactful course than had been taken by Sutherland's predecessor. If, while relations between the chief executive and the deputy postmaster general were thus strained, the office of the latter had been removed to Montreal, the chances of establishing a more cordial feeling on the part of the governor towards the post office would have greatly lessened.

The wisdom of the postmaster general in this matter was soon shown. It was not long before the post office incurred the hostility of the legislatures in both Upper and Lower Canada and its case would have been hard indeed, if it had not obtained the steady support of the governors and the executive councils in the two provinces.

A notable feature of Sutherland's administration was the extension of the service into settlements, which lay far off the beaten lines. The first of these to be provided with a post office was the settlement of Perth. In the summer of 1815, a number of Scotch artisans and peasants sailed from Greenock, attracted by the inducements held out to settlers in British North America,[Pg 115] and of these about sixty families spent the winter in Brockville on the St. Lawrence. When spring opened, they proceeded inland till they reached the Rideau river, and took up homes about the site of the present town of Perth.

The new settlement was almost immediately joined by a large number of disbanded troops, who were set free on the conclusion of peace with the United States. By October 1816, there were over sixteen hundred settlers in the district. They were fortunate in securing the interest of Sir John Sherbrooke, the governor general, at whose instance a post office was opened, and fortnightly trips were made with the mails from Brockville.[168]

A road was broken between the two places, but little could be said for it for some time. Dr. Mountain, the son of the first Anglican bishop of Quebec, and himself afterwards third bishop of Quebec, accompanied his father on an episcopal trip into Upper Canada in 1820. Among the places he visited was Perth. Of the road he said: "All the roads I have described before were turnpike and bowling green to this."[169] The road was divided into three stages of seven miles each, and the best the party could do was three hours for each stage.

In 1818, another settlement was formed in the same part of the country about thirty miles north of Perth. It was a military settlement, being made up of officers and men of the 99th and 100th regiments. This group did not enter upon its lands by way of the St. Lawrence, but is notable as the first considerable body to come into Upper Canada by way of the Ottawa river. They landed on the site of the present city of Ottawa, but did not stop there longer than was necessary to break a road through to their lands, which were situated about twenty miles to the westward. The settlement was called Richmond, in honour of the Duke of Richmond, the governor general, and this circumstance gave Ottawa its first name—Richmond Landing.

It was at Richmond that the duke came to his melancholy end that same summer, as the result of the bite of a fox. The duke had shown his interest in the settlement which bore his name in a number of ways, and shortly before his death he induced the deputy postmaster general to open a post office there. In order to provide it with mails, a blazed trail was made between the new settlement and Perth.[170][Pg 116]

The settlement at Richmond was not the first, however, in the Upper Ottawa district. In 1800, Philemon Wright, a New Englander, who had made one or two exploratory tours into the country, determined to form a settlement at Hull, on the Lower Canadian side of the river, and in that year he brought with him a group of his neighbours from Malden, Massachusetts.

These settlers were thrifty and intelligent, and by 1815, they had brought their settlement to a pitch of prosperity, which won special mention from Bouchette, the surveyor general. At that time there were about thirty families in the district, whose farms were in a respectable state of cultivation; and a large trade in timber, pot and pearl ashes was carried on.

The little settlement was so far from Montreal—one hundred and twenty miles—that it was at first impracticable to give it the benefit of the postal service. The isolation did not last long. Little bodies of settlers were taking up land at different points, both above and below the Long Sault rapids; and for some time before 1819, there had been a steamer running between Lachine and Carillon, at the foot of the Long Sault.[171]

In 1819, a steamer was put on the Upper Ottawa, running between the head of the Long Sault and Hull, and the Duke of Richmond appealed to Sutherland to open post offices on the river route. The deputy postmaster general at first demurred on the ground of expense, but he withdrew his objections on a guarantee being given by a number of gentlemen interested in the district, that the post office should be saved against any loss which might ensue. Offices were accordingly opened at St. Eustache and St. Andrews on the lower Ottawa, and at Grenville, Hawkesbury and Hull on the upper part of the river.[172]

Another part of the country to which the postal system was extended during this period was the eastern townships in Lower Canada. These townships lie along the northern border of eastern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. Owing to their contiguity to the United States, the settlement of these townships gave the British Government much concern.

Lord North, at the close of the war of the Revolution, desired to settle this border country with old soldiers. Haldimand, the governor general, was of another opinion, believing that the interests of peace would be best served by keeping the country[Pg 117] uncultivated, that it might serve as a barrier to the restless spirits from the south. Some effort was made to give effect to this view but without much success. Indeed the governors who followed Haldimand made grants in the townships freely; and in 1812, it was estimated that there were not less than 17,000 people settled there.

Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary, on learning in 1816 the state of affairs, was highly displeased that the policy of the government had been disregarded in this manner, and directed the governor to do what he could to discourage further settlement, and wherever possible to restore the cultivated country to a state of nature.

Mentioning particularly the townships at the western end of the province, the colonial secretary directed that no new roads were to be run into them, and advantage was to be taken of any circumstances that presented themselves of letting the roads already made fall into disuse. For five years this desolating policy was carried into execution.

In 1821, Lord Dalhousie, the governor general reported that the result was an utter failure. "These townships," he says "are the resort of all the felons escaping from justice within His Majesty's province or from the United States. Forgery, coining, and every crime is committed there with impunity. American lumbermen are cutting everywhere the best timber, and sit down where they please, and move about where they find it convenient."

A reversal of the mistaken policy resulted from the Dalhousie report. The first post office opened in the townships was at Stanstead,[173] the centre of a comfortable, well-settled population of about 2500. The village lay on the main stage route from Quebec into the state of Vermont. The post office at Stanstead was opened in 1817, and with three other offices opened at the same time had a weekly exchange of mails with Quebec by way of Three Rivers.

During Sutherland's administration, there were a considerable number of post offices opened, and many of them established at this period afterwards attained great importance. In 1816, when he became deputy postmaster general, there were only ten offices in Lower Canada and nine in Upper Canada. When he retired in 1827, there were forty-nine in Lower Canada and sixty-five in Upper Canada. In 1816, Belleville post office was opened under the name of bay of Quinte: in 1825, Hamilton, London, Brantford, and St. Thomas were provided with post offices.[Pg 118]

In Lower Canada, besides those already mentioned, a post office was opened at Sherbrooke in 1819, replacing an office established in Aston township in 1817.

A curious fact appears in the post office list of 1819. At this date Toronto was still called York, and Hamilton was without a post office altogether. Nevertheless a post office called Toronto was on the list of 1819 as having been opened in 1817, with Charles Fothergill as postmaster, and another called Hamilton was opened in 1819 with James Bethune as postmaster. There was nothing to indicate where these post offices were situated until changes were made in the names, and Toronto was converted into Port Hope and Hamilton into Cobourg.

Fothergill, who had the post office established at Port Hope, appears more than once in the course of post office history. He was member of the house of assembly and king's printer, as well as postmaster. About this time the house began to express dissatisfaction with the service provided by the post office, and to demand information as to its affairs, which the deputy postmaster general was not prepared to furnish. Among the critics was Fothergill, who was speedily punished for his independence. He was dismissed from the office of king's printer by the governor.[174]

The conveyance of the mails between Canada and Great Britain occupied much attention during Sutherland's term. The packets, that is the vessels employed expressly for the conveyance of the mails, had at this date almost ceased to be employed for the transmission of any but official correspondence. The interests of the governors and other officials in British North America and Bermuda, and of the British minister at Washington and consuls in the United States, were the only interests considered in the arrangements for this service.

Speedy transmission was sacrificed without a thought, to provide against imagined dangers to safe transmission. When the packet service was established, the vessels made monthly trips during the summer from Falmouth, in England, to Halifax and thence to New York, returning by the same route. The mails for Bermuda were landed at Halifax, and taken to their destination in a war vessel.

During the winter, the vessels from Falmouth did not run to Halifax, but proceeded directly to New York. In 1806, at the instance of the admiralty, orders were given that, whenever possible[Pg 119] during the winter, the packets should touch at Bermuda on their way to New York.[175] On the eve of the war of 1812, Prevost, the governor general, who was fearful for the safety of the mails, begged that this course might be adopted as the regular winter course, and that mails for Canada and other parts of British North America should be put off at Bermuda, and conveyed from there to Halifax.

To make the mails for Canada go as far south as Bermuda seems outrageous, but Prevost was willing to put up with any slowness in transmission rather than have his despatches touch United States soil. This course was pursued until the war ended in 1815, and continued for many winters after that time.

But it was too bad to escape criticism from officials themselves. At the end of the summer of 1816, when the packets were about to be taken off the Halifax route, the rear-admiral on the North American station asked that the packets should continue to call at Halifax during the winter, and, by way of satisfying the post office of the feasibility of his suggestion, furnished a list of some seventy vessels which had entered Halifax during the previous winter, which was allowed to be the severest for many years, and found no more trouble in making this port than the port of New York.[176]

The suggestion aroused great opposition—an opposition which would be quite incomprehensible to-day. The agent of the packet service at Falmouth assembled all commanders who happened to be in port, and asked them their opinion. They were unanimous in the belief that the only safe course to Halifax would be to go first to Bermuda, thence to New York, and finally to Halifax.[177] The prevalence of north-westerly winds during the winter would make a direct sailing from Falmouth to Halifax impracticable.

The commanders did not consider it advisable, however, to adopt this course, as it would lengthen the trip by from two to three weeks, and as the voyages would be much rougher, there would be few passengers. The wear and tear on the packets would be greater, and besides the men would require great coats and spirits. During the late war each packet took sixty gallons of rum each way.

Lord Dalhousie became governor general in 1819 and he made bitter complaint of the length of time taken in the delivery of his[Pg 120] winter despatches.[178] The despatches leaving England in November 1821 and 1822, did not reach him until the following February, and his February despatches arrived in Quebec in May. He asked that the mails containing his correspondence should not be put off the packet at Bermuda, but that they be carried to New York, where he would have his messenger on hand to receive them.

It is difficult to see why this should not have been done. Ever since the establishment of peace in 1783, there had been a British packet agent at New York, whose sole duty it was to act as intermediary for the despatch by the outgoing British packet boat, of all correspondence reaching him from the governors or other officials in British North America, or from the ambassadors or consuls in the United States.[179]

Dalhousie's messenger took his outgoing despatches to the packet agent, and the governor could not understand the objections to allowing the same messenger to carry the incoming despatches back with him. The packet agent at New York strongly supported the governor's request, and pointed out how his own office might be made of much greater utility, if he were employed freely, not only for the transmission of official correspondence, but for the interchange of general correspondence between Canada and Great Britain. He declared that the United States government had shown the utmost courtesy to the governor's messengers. They had not been molested in any way, and for some time past, the earlier practice of requiring the couriers to be provided with passports had been allowed to drop.[180]

The agent proposed that during the winter the English exchange office should make up separate bags for Upper and Lower Canada, which on arrival at New York would be delivered to his office. He would then see that the bags were forwarded by special messenger without delay.

His plan, however, was open to strong objection, and the British post office, which was averse to making any change in the direction proposed, was quick to seize upon it. While acknowledging the good will of the United States government regarding the conveyance of official despatches through their territory by British messengers, the secretary stated that the conveyance of ordinary mails by the same means was a very different matter, which would give rise to a justifiable claim on the part of the United States department, and if the charges which would have to be paid to the United[Pg 121] States department were added to the other postage rates, the total postage to be collected from the recipients of the letters would be very large.

But the argument of the secretary was based on the supposition that the mails would be carried as the despatches were, by Canadian messengers from New York, and that the letters they carried would be subject to a double charge, viz:—the expenses of the messenger, and the sum which the United States might exact for the mere transit over its territory. If the British mails arriving at New York by the packet were handed over to the United States post office for transmission, as had been the case before the war of 1812, there would have been no such excessive charge.

This was what was desired on all sides in Canada. The service would have been much faster, and for Montreal and all places in Upper Canada the postage would have been lower. Since the spring of 1817, steamboats were employed to carry the mails between New York and Albany twice a week, and with other improvements on the route, the time between New York and Montreal was shortened to three days in summer and five in winter.

From New York to York took from nine to eleven days by way of Montreal, and a day less if the mails were carried from New York along the Mohawk valley route to Queenston on the Niagara river, and thence to York.

Compare this with the time occupied between Halifax and Quebec. A month was the average, and to that had to be added two days to Montreal and eight days to York. No advantage enjoyed by Halifax over New York on the sea trip could compensate for the disparity from which the land route between Halifax and Montreal suffered in comparison with the route from New York to Montreal, and as Montreal was the gateway to Upper Canada, the whole of the new province suffered in equal measure with that city.

The gain in time by the New York route was submitted to the general post office, but the proposition to land the mails at that port was opposed by the secretary. He found that there would be eightpence less postage on each letter to Quebec, if it were sent through the United States instead of through the Maritime provinces, and, besides, he was doubtful as to the propriety of sanctioning any scheme which would permit private and mercantile letters to reach Quebec before the government despatches, which in any case must come by way of Halifax.

But though the comings and the goings of the packets were a matter of much concern to Lord Dalhousie and to others, whose[Pg 122] correspondence had to be carried by this means, they were of little moment to the general public, who had found a very satisfactory means for the conveyance of their correspondence.

In 1826, the treasury set on foot inquiries as to the arrangements for the conveyance of correspondence across the Atlantic, and the information they obtained must have surprised them.[181] There were three modes of sending letters to Canada from Great Britain. The first was by the official sailing packets. The usefulness of the packets, however, was limited to the conveyance of official despatches.

The high charges and the slowness of the service abundantly account for the failure of the public to employ this means of transmission. The postage on a single letter, that is a single sheet of paper weighing less than an ounce, was two shillings and twopence sterling from London to Halifax by way of Falmouth. To this must be added the postage from Halifax to points in Canada, which was one shilling and eightpence to Quebec; one shilling and tenpence to Montreal; two shillings and twopence to Kingston; two shillings and sixpence to York; and three shillings to Amherstburg.

Thus, employing the more familiar decimal currency, the postage on a single sheet, weighing less than one ounce, posted in London and sent by packet to Halifax and thence to its destination in Canada was, to Quebec ninety-two cents; to Montreal ninety-six cents; to Kingston one dollar and four cents; to York one dollar and twelve cents; and to Amherstburg one dollar and twenty-four cents. Remembering Dalhousie's complaint that it took upwards of seventy days for one of these precious letters to reach him, the unpopularity of the packet service can be appreciated.

The second agency for conveying letters from England to Canada, was by private ship, but through the medium of the post office. A person desiring to send a letter from London to a post office in Canada would write on the cover a direction that the letter was to be sent by a ship which he would name, and post it in the ordinary way.

The post office would accept the direction, and would charge just one half the packet postage for the conveyance to Halifax or Quebec, that is, instead of two shillings and twopence for the sea conveyance, the letter would only be charged one shilling and one penny. But the high charges between the port of arrival in[Pg 123] British North America and the offices in inland Canada prevented the extensive use of this means of conveyance.

The third mode of conveyance was irregular, but it was universally employed. There were lines of sailing vessels, called American packets, running between Liverpool and New York, which were fast sailers, and which would carry letters from England to the United States for twopence a letter, without regard to its weight or the number of enclosures it contained.

The agents of these lines kept bags in their offices in London and Liverpool, and when the vessels were due to sail, the bags were sealed and placed on board. The conveyance of the letter bags from London to Liverpool by the messengers of the sailing lines was illegal, as the postmaster general had the exclusive right to convey letters within the United Kingdom. There could have been no possibility of carrying on the traffic in a clandestine manner, as it was wholesale in character, and comprised the correspondence of the most eminent merchants in London. On inquiry it was learned that one merchant alone sent one thousand letters by this means, and not one by the official packets, and the practice was universal.[182]

On the arrival of the American packets at New York, the letters for Canada were deposited in the New York post office, and forwarded to the Canadian border office in the United States mails, and thence to their destination. The postage by this course was very much less than by either of the other routes.

It was made up of three factors: the ocean postage of four cents, the United States postage of nineteen or twenty-five cents—according to the point at which the Canadian border was reached—and the inland Canadian postage. The charge on a single letter to Quebec was forty-seven cents instead of ninety-two cents, which would be due if sent by the packet route. To Montreal, Kingston, York and Amherstburg, the postage on a letter from London or Liverpool was thirty-one cents, forty-seven cents, forty-one cents and sixty-one cents, as against ninety-six cents, one dollar and four cents, one dollar and twelve cents and one dollar and twenty-four cents respectively.

Letters to York coming from New York had the advantage of a daily conveyance to Lewiston, where the transfer to the Canadian[Pg 124] border office at Queenstown was made, and of the lower charges which the United States post office imposed for long distances. These figures, the lowest then attainable, inevitably suggest comparisons.

It is only a few years since good citizens were rejoicing that the postage rate between the mother country and Canada was brought down from five cents to two cents a letter. Here was a link of empire of daily utility. Communication could be kept up between the British immigrant and his friends at home without too heavy a draft on slender purses. His heart would remain British, and as he prospered he would induce others of his friends and neighbours to come over and settle.

A glance backward will show how little these agencies of empire were able to effect in our grandfather's time. The lowest possible postage charge from London to York fifty years ago was forty-one cents, and that would carry no more than one sheet of paper weighing less than an ounce. If within the folds of this sheet were found another piece of paper no larger than a postage stamp, the charge of conveyance from New York to York was doubled, and with the ocean postage of four cents, the poor immigrant would have to pay seventy-eight cents for his letter.

If the letter weighed an ounce, that is, if it were such a letter as would pass anywhere within the British Empire for four cents, the charge for it coming from London to York would be one dollar and fifty-two cents. Finally, if this ounce letter were sent by the All-Red route, that is by the British packet to Halifax and thence over British soil to York, the postage charge would be four dollars and forty-eight cents. Imperial sentiment must have rivalled wit in economy of expression in those days.

While the British post office was unwilling to encourage the use of the United States mails for the conveyance of letters between Canada and Great Britain, it was anxious to put the British packet service on a better footing. But the service had been going from bad to worse, and it had reached a stage where it satisfied nobody.

Of the three points to which mails were carried—Halifax, New York and Bermuda—the last named always held the position of advantage during the winter. Until the winter of 1826 the packet called first at Bermuda, leaving Canadian mails there, and continuing on to New York. At the beginning of the winter of 1826 a change was made.[183] The packet sailed to Bermuda, put off the United States mails there, and sailed northward to Halifax,[Pg 125] omitting New York. The United States mails were conveyed by mail boat from Bermuda to Annapolis, Maryland.

This scheme remedied none of the defects of its predecessor, and brought with it the additional disadvantage that it cut off all direct connection between the British minister at Washington, and the governors of the British colonies.

The secretary of the post office in explaining the arrangements to the postmaster general washed his hands of all responsibility for them. He declared that the plan originated with the admiralty, and was sanctioned by the foreign and colonial secretaries as a practical measure. The postmaster general on reviewing the correspondence was not surprised at the general dissatisfaction, and was glad that the arrangements could not be laid at the door of the post office.

The ocean mail service was beyond the control of the deputy postmaster general of Canada. The postal relations with the United States were not, and he exerted himself to improve these. A hardship under which Canadian merchants doing business with the United States laboured was that they had to pay the postage on all their letters as far as the United States border.

It will be difficult to-day to see wherein the grievance of the early Canadian merchants lay. But at that time the postage was a considerable item in every transaction, and the merchant could not afford to disregard it. When he sold a bill of goods to a customer in the United States, he was obliged to throw on the customer the burden of the postage on the correspondence relating to the goods, and the only sure way of doing this was to post the letters unpaid, and leave the customer to pay the postage on the delivery of the letters. If he had to pay from eight to twenty cents which were required to take each single letter as far as the border, he was apt to lose this sum.

To protect themselves the Canadian merchants used to employ private messengers to carry their letters as far as the nearest post office in the United States, and post them there. From this United States office the letters would go to their destination without pre-payment.

Sutherland informed the postmaster general that some of the leading mercantile houses in Canada sent hundreds of letters into the United States by private hand.[184]

The United States merchant selling goods in Canada stood in a better position as regards his correspondence. He was able to[Pg 126] post his letters for Canada unpaid, and the letter came into Canada and went to its destination, where the person addressed paid the postage on delivery of the letter. This was made possible by an arrangement between the deputy postmaster general of Canada, and the post office department at Washington, by which the former undertook to collect and pay over to the latter the share of the postage which was due to the United States department, receiving twenty per cent. for his trouble.

The arrangement was a purely private one, for which Sutherland did not feel called upon to account to the general post office. What he desired was that there should be some postmaster in the United States who would act as agent for the collection of Canadian postage on letters entering the United States from Canada, and he found the postmaster of Swanton, Vermont, quite willing to act in this capacity.

As Swanton was the United States post office through which all correspondence passed from Lower Canada into the United States, the postmaster was well situated for this duty. The only difficulty was about the commission of twenty per cent., which would have to be paid to the postmaster as compensation. It was necessary to obtain the consent of the British post office to this arrangement, as the deputy postmaster general had no power to make abatements in the postage due to Canada, without the authority of the postmaster general.

But this consent the postmaster general was not disposed to give.[185] Besides the objection that the Canadian post office would receive only eighty per cent. of the postage due on letters going to the United States, the secretary suggested to the postmaster general that it would seem inadvisable, politically, to encourage unlimited correspondence between all sorts of persons in the two countries, without possibility of restriction or of learning (should it be necessary) with whom any particular person was in correspondence.

Indeed, the secretary had his doubts as to the legality of the arrangement by which Sutherland acted as agent for the collection of the United States postage on letters coming from that country into Canada. The rates of postage, said he, are distinctly specified in various acts of parliament, and the Canadian post office had no power to demand more than the sum required by the statutes. If it were thought advisable to have Canadian postmasters collect United States postage, a new legislative provision would have to be[Pg 127] made, which would lead to similar applications from other countries, and the result would be confusion and loss of revenue.

Whatever might have been the consequence of a strict interpretation of the law, as intimated by the postmaster general, the deputy postmaster general did not discontinue the convenient, and, to him, profitable practice of providing for the transmission of unpaid letters from the United States addressed to Canada.

So far from that, Sutherland improved on this arrangement. At the solicitation of Canadian merchants, he obtained the consent of the United States department to having British mails, landed at New York, passed on to Canada without being held for the United States postage. The postage due for the conveyance of the letters through the United States was collected by the deputy postmaster general, and transmitted by him to Washington, and the delays incident to having this work done in the United States were avoided.[186]

On the 15th of February, 1825, a memorial[187] was addressed to the British government by the Marquess of Ormonde, the Knight of Kerry and Simon McGillivray, proposing to establish communication between Great Britain and the British North American colonies by steam vessels, and asking for the exclusive privilege of providing such a service for fourteen years.

At this time steamboats were in pretty general use in the inland and coastal waters of Great Britain, United States and Canada, but nothing had up to this time been done to demonstrate that it would be practicable to cross the Atlantic by a steamboat.

In 1819, a sailing vessel, the "Savannah," fitted up with a boiler and engine and provided with a pair of paddles which could be hauled on deck at will, started from Savannah, Georgia, for Liverpool. The voyage occupied twenty-seven days. Only for three days and eight hours was the "Savannah" under steam.

There was nothing in this experiment to induce the conviction that steam could be successfully employed as a means of propulsion on the transatlantic service, and as a matter of fact the machinery was removed from the "Savannah" on her return to her American port, and she spent the rest of a short existence as an ordinary sailing vessel between New York and Savannah.

Lord Ormonde and his associates were convinced of the practicability of steam navigation across the Atlantic, but to make an enterprise of that kind a success, they would have to satisfy the public on the point, and this would involve a large outlay. In[Pg 128] asking for a fourteen years' monopoly, they argued that their proposition would not produce the ordinary ill-effects of a monopoly, as any tendency they might exhibit towards excessive charges would be held in check by sailing vessels, and by steamships, which would inevitably be run between the United States and ports on the continent of Europe.

The proposed line was to consist of six vessels, three of 1000 tons, and three of 600 tons, which would make their way across the Atlantic in pairs, one large and one small steamer. The vessels would sail together between Valentia, Ireland, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. On arrival at Halifax, the vessels would separate, one going to New York and the other to Quebec. When the two vessels reached Valentia on the voyage home, one would proceed to Glasgow, and the other to Bristol. The memorial was not entertained, and the project dropped.

Sutherland, in his personal relations, showed much more tact than Heriot; and in the controversies which arose between him and the colonial legislatures, Sutherland contrived to range himself on the side of the governors, thus making the post office one of the matters of which the ultra-British parties undertook the defence against the attacks of the Radicals.

But the situation of the deputy postmaster general was too difficult for him to secure unalloyed success. The various interests he had to serve, and, as far as possible, to reconcile, were too antagonistic for complete success. On the one side was a country being settled rapidly and clamouring for postal service in all directions. On the other stood the general post office fixed in its determination that its profits should not be diminished, and scanning anxiously every fresh item of expenditure.

Any serious inclination in one direction was sure to arouse resentment in the other. A curious instance of this occurred in 1819, three years after Sutherland had taken office. A number of merchants and others in Montreal appointed a committee to wait on the deputy postmaster general with a memorial containing an expression of their opinions and desires respecting the postal service in Canada.

The post office in Montreal it was urged had become unsuitable as regards site and space for the accommodation of the public, and the assistance employed by the postmaster was unequal to the requirements of an efficient service. The communications with the United States, Upper Canada and within the province, should be increased in frequency, and an interchange of mails[Pg 129] should be opened with the Genesee and other settlements in New York state by way of Prescott and Ogdensburg. The memorialists also desired that letters might be sent to the United States without prepayment of postage.

Sutherland, in his reply to the memorial, dealt with the committee with an engaging frankness.[188] He was well aware, he said, that the accommodation in Montreal post office was inadequate, but what was to be done? The postmaster had only £300 a year salary, and out of that he had to pay office rent and stationery. It was not to be wondered at, that the postmaster endeavoured to economize in every way possible. He, himself, had on more than one occasion advised the postmaster general of the necessity for greater clerical help, but so far without the desired effect.

Only the year before, Sutherland told the memorialists, he had submitted to the postmaster general with his strongest recommendation, a petition from the postmaster of Montreal for increased salary and assistance, but the petition was refused. As for the increase in the frequency of the communications it was beyond his power to authorize such an expenditure. He had done his best on two recent occasions to induce the postmaster general to allow letters to go into the United States without the prepayment of postage, but was told that British postage must be paid on letters going into foreign states.

The memorial and Sutherland's reply were transmitted to the general post office. There they excited much indignation. Freeling, the secretary, in a minute to the postmaster general, professed his inability to understand whether this unreserved disclosure of Sutherland's proceeded merely from indiscretion or from some other motive. The postmaster general was, in effect, accused of inattention and supineness in the discharge of his duties. His decisions were placed in the most invidious light before the inhabitants of Montreal.

Indeed the whole circumstance had to Freeling the air of an understanding between Sutherland and the committee. The postmaster general was equally indignant, and ordered Sutherland's dismissal. But, as so often happened, Freeling changed his attitude, urging a number of countervailing circumstances against this extreme measure, and the postmaster general, who appeared to do little more than to convert the opinions and suggestions which Freeling so humbly submitted into departmental decisions, concurred in this recommendation.[189][Pg 130]

In 1824, Sutherland met with a serious financial loss. The postmaster at Montreal became a defaulter to the extent of £1706. Sutherland took action against the postmaster's sureties, but owing to informalities his suit was thrown out. He appealed to the general post office, alleging that the reason of his non-suit was its failure to answer certain questions which he had put to the postmaster general. The appeal was not allowed. In 1827, Sutherland retired owing to ill-health, and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Thomas Allen Stayner, the last and, in some respects, the most distinguished of the representatives of the British post office in Canada.

[Pg 131]

To those who have followed the course of events thus far, noting the uncompromising attitude of the general post office towards all propositions for the extension of the postal system in Canada, it will be obvious that a struggle for the means of communication impended, which the rapid growth of the country was fast precipitating.

The general post office claimed that it, and it alone, had power to establish a postal service in any part of the country, and it used its arrogated powers in the same manner as any commercial monopoly would be exercised. Post offices were opened in all the better settled parts of the country, where they could be operated profitably. They were refused in the newer districts, unless satisfactory guarantees were given that there would be no loss in working them.

A population was coming into the country rapidly, and was tending towards the inland parts of the province far from the line of post offices which skirted the shores of the St. Lawrence and lake Ontario, and the situation was becoming embarrassing, as well as humiliating to the sensitive pride of the people.

It was easy enough to open post offices on the route pursued by the mail courier from the eastern boundary of the province to Niagara. But it was frequently expensive to open new routes, and the provincial government of Upper Canada was disinclined to give guarantees against loss on particular routes, while it had evidence that considerable profits were being taken from the older routes, and sent to the general post office in London.

Just how acute the position of matters was becoming will be clear from a survey of the distribution of population in Upper Canada at this time, with a view of the post offices provided for the accommodation of the several parts. We are able to throw out our sketch of the state of settlement in Upper Canada, by employing the results of the census of 1824.[Pg 132]

The total population of the province in 1824 was 149,941, of whom 63,000 were in the western district, that is, west of York. Between the eastern boundary of the province and York, there were twenty-six post offices. Four of these—Perth, Lanark, Richmond and Hawkesbury—served inland settlements, the nearest of which was over twenty-five miles from the St. Lawrence. The line of settlements which these four offices served was scattered over a territory over one hundred miles in length, and from twenty to thirty in width. It comprised a population of 12,476.

The remaining twenty-two offices, east of York, were, with one exception, situated on the shores of the river St. Lawrence and lake Ontario. Each afforded accommodation to a district about fourteen miles in length, and between twenty and thirty miles in depth. The mails were carried twice a week over this route. These arrangements gave a fair service to the settlements through which the couriers passed, but they compared meanly with the daily service from New York to Buffalo, on the other side of lake Ontario.

But it was the inland settlements west of York that had most reason to complain of the lack of facilities for communication. The Niagara peninsula, embracing the territory between lake Ontario and lake Erie, and lying west of a line dropped perpendicularly from Hamilton to lake Erie, contained a population of 20,000, distributed with fair evenness over a stretch of country forty-five miles in length, and from twenty-five to thirty in breadth.

The people of this district were served by four offices on its northern border—Dundas, Grimsby, St. Catherines and Niagara—and one office—Queenstown—on its eastern border. Although there were settlements in every part of the district, there was not a single post office within it on the lake Erie shore, or, indeed, anywhere farther inland than three miles from the shore of lake Ontario, or of the Niagara river.

Poorly provided as the Niagara district was, the people living in it had less ground for grievance in respect of post office facilities than the settlers in the London district. This district was an immense irregular block made up of the counties of Middlesex, Oxford, Brant, Norfolk and Elgin. It measured eighty miles in length, and from forty to fifty miles in depth. It contained in 1824 a population of 16,588, which, as in the other districts, was distributed through every part.

This great district had but five post offices in it, one in each county. The two offices on the lake Erie shore—Vittoria and[Pg 133] Port Talbot—were sixty miles apart; while the three offices—Burford, Woodstock and Delaware—were twenty miles from lake Erie.

As illustrating the difficulty of moving the general post office to recognize the responsibility, which its claims of a monopoly seemed to impose on it, Dr. Rolph, who represented the county of Middlesex in the house of assembly, stated[190] that before the post office was opened at Delaware, he had made application to the deputy postmaster general for a post office in Middlesex county, and was told that the office would be established in the county if he would guarantee the expenses of the conveyance of the mails, but that his application could not be considered on any other terms.

As individual effort was plainly hopeless, the subject was taken up by the house of assembly of Upper Canada. The house dealt with the question vigorously, but not on the lines suggested by the foregoing review of the state of the postal service. More serious aspects of the case engaged their attention. Men on the streets and in farm houses believed that they were victims of imposition on the part of the deputy postmaster general, and that he was charging them more for the conveyance of their letters than the imperial statutes warranted, high as the legitimate charges were.

Discussion on these grievances brought the people forward to another point, and they asked themselves by what right the British government imposed on a self-governing community an institution like the post office, which not only fixed its charges without reference to the people of Upper Canada, but which insisted on preventing the people from establishing an institution of the same sort under their own authority.

It was to these questions that the house of assembly addressed itself. The rates of postage which were charged in Canada, were collected under the authority of an act of the imperial parliament passed in 1765. This act amended the act of Queen Anne's reign, which was regarded as the charter of the post office in British America.

The rates, as fixed by the act of 1765, were, for a single sheet of paper weighing less than an ounce, fourpence-halfpenny currency, if the distance the letter was carried did not exceed sixty miles; if the distance were from sixty to one hundred miles, the charge[Pg 134] was sevenpence; from one hundred to two hundred miles, ninepence, and for every one hundred miles beyond two hundred miles, twopence.

The first inquiry of the house was as to whether these rates, and no more, were charged for conveyance in Upper Canada. On February 29, 1820, William Allan, postmaster of York, was called to the bar of the house, and questioned as to the rates charged by him for letters to the several post offices in Upper Canada.

Allan did not know the distance to the post offices, but he furnished the table of rates which had been given to him. The house asked one of its members, Mahlon Burwell, a land surveyor, to state the several distances, when it appeared that every rate charged by the postmaster of York, was higher than the imperial act warranted.[191]

Thus the legal charge on a letter to Dundas was fourpence-halfpenny. The charge made by the postmaster of York was sevenpence. On letters to Grimsby, St. Catharines, Niagara and Queenston, the legal charge was sevenpence—Allan charged tenpence. Amherstburg, which was at the western limit of the province, was between two hundred and three hundred miles from York, and the charge should have been elevenpence. Instead of this sixteen pence was charged.

So far the house had made out its case, and on the following day it adopted a resolution that for several years past the rates of postage charged in Upper Canada had exceeded the charges authorized by law, and that the lieutenant governor should be requested to submit the question to the imperial authorities for a remedy.

Peregrine Maitland, the lieutenant governor, did as he was requested, and, when the resolution came before the postmaster general in England, Freeling, the secretary of the general post office, admitted, in reply[192] to the postmaster general's request for information, that the rates in British North America were regulated by the imperial act of 1765, but he held that there were other circumstances to be considered.

Freeling did not know whether the ordinary rates would produce sufficient revenue to cover the expenses of the service. If not, then he would refer the postmaster general to a letter written by General Hunter, the lieutenant governor in 1800, which contained[Pg 135] an undertaking on the part of the lieutenant governor that, in case there was a deficit, the amount of the shortage would be made good either from the contingencies of the province, or by a vote of the legislature. Freeling would call upon the deputy postmaster general in Canada to report whether the legal postage would be equal to the expense. If so, there was no reason to require the province to grant any aid.

This explanation, like so many which had to be made at that period, lacked the essential element of sincerity. Hunter's engagement was to make good deficits, not by allowing illegal postal charges to be made, but by withdrawing the amount of the deficit from the provincial treasury. This was a point on which Freeling himself insisted on several occasions.

In Sir Gordon Drummond's time, there was an application from the military authorities for a more frequent service between Kingston and Montreal, which was coupled with an offer to pay such extra postage as would be necessary to cover the cost of the service desired. Freeling declared that such an offer could not be accepted, unless the additional charges were sanctioned by the British parliament.[193]

Another case, involving the same principle, arose about this time. Sutherland, the deputy postmaster general, desired to facilitate the interchange of correspondence with the United States, and reported to the postmaster general that he had arranged to have the American postage on letters coming from the United States to Canada collected by postmasters in Canada, at the same time as they collected the Canadian postage. Freeling objected to this arrangement as of doubtful legality, on the ground that the act of 1765 prescribed the amount which postmasters should take on every letter, and it might be necessary to amend the act to permit this scheme.[194]

The house of assembly, however, did not wait for the answer to their remonstrance. In the following session they gave themselves up to the consideration of the more vital questions, as to "how far the present system is sanctioned by law, and whether and in what manner the same can be beneficially altered." This was not the first occasion on which the right of the British post office to collect postage in Canada was called in question.

Governor Simcoe, in 1791,[195] assumed it as indisputable that, when a postal system was established in Upper Canada, it would[Pg 136] be under the control of the legislature, unless the British government by express enactment, retained the management of it in the hands of the British post office, paying over to the local government all surplus revenues arising therefrom. The question was not decided at that time, and it was only when the course pursued by the general post office was so unsatisfactory to Canadians that it was again raised.

A committee was appointed in 1821, to investigate the subject with Dr. W. W. Baldwin as chairman. On December 10 the report was laid before the assembly.[196] The committee had little help from the post office in pursuit of its inquiries. The only official available, the postmaster of York, was examined, but whether from unwillingness or want of knowledge, he contributed little information to the inquiry.

Allan stated that he was appointed by the deputy postmaster general under his hand and seal. He occasionally received instructions from the deputy postmaster general, but had no idea as to the authority under which the latter acted. He had never been referred to any particular statute for his guidance, and, indeed, the postage on letters within the province had been charged at arbitrary rates, which were fixed by the deputy postmaster general.

Some valuable information respecting the revenue of his office was submitted by Allan, which completely disproved the intimation of the secretary of the general post office, that the offices in that part of the country were conducted at a loss. The post office at York yielded an annual revenue of between £800 and £900, which was remitted to the deputy postmaster general at Quebec.

The committee found it impracticable to call the postmasters of the more distant offices, but having regard to all the circumstances, they were satisfied that there was remitted each year to the deputy postmaster general at Quebec an amount exceeding £2500, of which perhaps ten per cent. or eleven per cent. was foreign postage collected in Canada, and, therefore, due to Great Britain or the United States.

Next the committee addressed themselves to the question as to how this surplus was disposed of, which, after deducting the amount owing to the other postal administrations was probably more than £2000. Allan believed, though he was unable to give it as a fact, that the money was passed over to London. What was beyond doubt, however, was that this revenue in no way inured to the benefit of Upper Canada.[Pg 137]

Assuming, as the committee felt they might safely do, that the surplus from Canada was made part of the revenue of the general post office in London, the committee then sought to ascertain how the revenue of the general post office was dealt with, and whether any part of it was employed for the benefit of the colonies.

The post office acts of 1710[197] and 1801[198] made this point clear. It appeared that after certain deductions had been made for pensions, the revenue of the post office was applied in various specified ways to the service of Great Britain, the postal rates being avowedly levied for raising the necessary supplies, and for making a permanent addition to the public revenue. The committee could find no instance in which any part of the post office revenues was devoted to the use of the colonies.

Taking it, then, as established that a sum exceeding £2000 was raised each year in Upper Canada as profit from its post office, and that this sum was applied, not for the benefit of Upper Canada, but for the purposes of the public service in Great Britain, the committee next turned its attention to the laws bearing on the situation.

There was an act passed in 1778[199] in the hope of staying the rising rebellion in the American colonies entitled "an act for removing all doubts and apprehensions concerning taxation by the parliament of Great Britain in any of the colonies and plantations in North America and the West Indies." It declared that the king and parliament would not impose any duty, tax or assessment whatever, payable in any of the colonies in North America or the West Indies, except any such duties as it might be expedient to impose for the regulation of commerce.

But although the collection of such duties should be made by officials of the British government, it was not intended that the proceeds should go into the British treasury; for it was provided that the net produce from them should be paid over to the colony in which they were levied, to form part of the general revenue of such colony. This seems sufficiently explicit, but that there might be no doubt as to the applicability of the provisions of this act to the provinces of Canada, they were expressly incorporated in the constitutional act of 1791, which was the charter under which the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada were established.

As in the act of 1778, there was reserved to the British parliament,[Pg 138] in the general interest of the empire, the power to make laws for the regulation of commerce, but there was also the same stipulation that the proceeds from such laws should be applied to the use of the province in which the taxes were levied, and in any manner the legislature of the province might think fit.

Applying the acts of 1778 and 1791 to the circumstances of the case in hand, the committee were of opinion that the collection of postage could not be regarded as a regulation of commerce, and as such within the scope of imperial legislation.

But even if it should appear that they were wrong in this opinion, and that the British government had the power to set up a post office in Upper Canada with the exclusive right to carry letters within the province, there was one thing the British government could not properly do. While the constitutional act of 1791 remained unrepealed, the British government could not take the net produce from the post office in Upper Canada, and use it as part of the general revenue of Great Britain.

Having satisfied themselves that, however strong the grounds might be on which the postmaster general of England had proceeded in establishing a post office in Canada, they could not prevail against the acts which have been considered, the committee next gave their attention to inquiring what those grounds might be, and how far they would bear out the pretensions of the postmaster general.

The two acts, which it seemed to the committee the postmaster general would most likely depend upon, were the acts of 1710 and of 1801. The act of 1710, which was the charter for the post office in British America, was dismissed from consideration as not even by its own provisions applying to the colony of Canada, and as annulled so far as concerned any of the colonies by the act of 1778, and as regards Canada by the constitutional act of 1791.

The second of the two acts—that of 1801—repealed all the rates of postage enacted by the act of 1710, and fixed new rates for Great Britain, but made no mention of new colonial rates. Hence, since 1801, there had been no colonial postage rates having the sanction of law, and the committee concluded that the colonies were designedly omitted, when the rates for Great Britain were fixed by the act of 1801, for the reason that the act of 1778 supervened, which made it illegal for the British parliament to impose a tax on a colony for the financial benefit of Great Britain.

The committee admitted that it was a matter for argument whether the unrepealed parts of the act of 1710 might not be held[Pg 139] applicable to Canada, but conceding the whole argument on this point, the utmost power remaining in the act was to authorize the establishment of a postal system in Canada. All power to fix the postal charges was taken away by the act of 1801.

As for the act of 1801, which established a scale of rates, by no liberality of construction could it be made to apply to Canada, because the act of 1778 was against it, and the constitutional act of 1791 was against it, and the fact that the revenues to be raised by the act were to be appropriated to the purposes of the United Kingdom made it illegal for the postmaster general to enforce it in the province.

There were other acts passed by the imperial parliament affecting the postage rates, but an examination of these disclosed no intention to make the acts operative in the colonies. Rates were fixed for conveyance in the United Kingdom, and to and from the colonies in America, but nothing was said as to the rates within the colonies. It was quite clear to the committee, therefore, that the only acts, which by any possibility could be made applicable to the colonies, were inoperative in the Canadas.

The committee clinched the argument by a survey of the laws passed by the British parliament, levying taxes on the colonies. They showed that whenever such taxes were imposed, the proceeds were never applied to the purposes of the United Kingdom, but always to the use of the colony concerned. There was an act passed in 1764 imposing duties on the sugar plantations. The revenue was devoted to the protection of their trade.

The Quebec revenue act of 1774[200] was the other case. This act imposed duties on rum, brandy, and other liquors coming into the province, and employed the proceeds for the establishment of a fund to aid in defraying the charges of the administration of justice and of the civil government in the province of Quebec. It was clear, then, that the acts of 1778 and 1791 contained no new principle, but were simply declaratory of the steady policy of the British government as disclosed by a review of its earlier practice; and everything combined to satisfy the committee that the legislature of the mother country never contemplated the raising of a tax by inland postage in the colony of Upper Canada.

The committee concluded by submitting for the acceptance of the house a resolution to the effect that the present system of public posts for the conveyance of letters within the province had grown into use without the sanction of law, and that a bill should be introduced[Pg 140] establishing public posts and fixing the rates of postage on letters and packets for the purpose of raising a permanent revenue, applicable solely to the improvement of the roads throughout the province.

The proposition of the assembly was thoroughly conservative. It was simply that the profits from the post office should be devoted to improving the means by which the post office was carried on. Settlements were springing up in all parts of the province which reason and policy made it necessary to connect with the more central districts, and it was only proper that the profits arising from the system should be used for improving and extending it.

At this period and for a long time afterwards the roads throughout the province were in a wretched condition. One of the principal mail contractors informed a committee of the house in 1829, that all the main roads in the province were very bad, and that those in the neighbourhood of York were bringing discredit on the inhabitants. The deputy postmaster general informed the same committee that he had just been advised that the contractors on the road from Montreal to Niagara had to swim their horses over some of the rivers on the route, the bridges having been carried away.

Peregrine Maitland, the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, forwarded the report of the committee of 1821 to the colonial office, with a letter in which he explained that what the legislature desired was to have the control of the provincial posts vested in them, or at least to have a deputy postmaster general for Upper Canada. With the latter request he fully sympathised, as he was convinced that a deputy postmaster general residing in Quebec could not possibly appreciate the requirements of the rapidly rising communities, situated so far from his headquarters.

The lieutenant governor shared the opinion of the legislature that it was contrary to the acts of 1778 and 1791 to send remittances from Canada to England, but he did not believe that the legislature would have concerned themselves with the subject, if the post office authorities had provided a satisfactory service.

At the general post office in London the report was turned over to the solicitor with directions to prepare a case for submission to the law officers of the crown. The law officers were requested to give their opinion as to whether the postmaster general of the United Kingdom had the right to control and manage the internal posts in the provinces of North America, and, if so, whether the proceeds derived from the inland conveyance of letters in North[Pg 141] America ought to be paid into the exchequer of the United Kingdom or whether they ought to be applied to the use of the province from which they were taken.

But the case as prepared did not reach the law officers. The postmaster general had the good sense to see that his case was precarious, and he did not care to risk an adverse decision.

Freeling, accordingly, wrote to Maitland,[201] admitting that the postal transactions of Upper and Lower Canada together showed a small surplus, but he inclined to the view that the share of Upper Canada in the surplus must be very small. A number of post offices had been opened in Upper Canada and the impression in the general post office was that they were unprofitable.

If, as Maitland had intimated, the wishes of Upper Canada would be satisfied by the appointment of a separate deputy postmaster general for Upper Canada, the postmaster general, Freeling informed the governor, would make no difficulty on the point, but would naturally select for the position one of the more experienced officers such as the postmaster of York or of Kingston.

In the meantime, while the report of 1821 was being discussed by the secretary of the post office and the lieutenant governor, the members of the assembly were endeavouring to procure further information to strengthen the position they had taken. They desired to learn definitely the amount which was sent to London as postal revenue. The postmaster of York could tell them little beyond the transactions of his own office, but the contribution from that office made it clear that the revenue from the whole province must be considerable.

No information could be obtained by direct inquiry of the deputy postmaster general, but it was thought that the post office would not refuse to answer a question on the subject asked by a member of parliament.

A question was accordingly put in the house of commons in 1822, but Freeling informed the representative of the post office[202] in the house of commons that the information should not be given, as the provinces were manifesting a disposition to interfere with the internal posts, and to appropriate their revenues to their own purposes, instead of allowing them to flow into the exchequer of the United Kingdom. The maintenance of the packet service, he declared to be of the greatest political importance, as ensuring despatches against passing through foreign hands.[Pg 142]

The course pursued by the post office under the influence of Freeling was in no way creditable to it. At a time when it was making grudging admissions that there was a small profit from the Canadian post offices, there was being sent over to London from the two provinces a sum exceeding £6000 a year, an amount which, wisely spent, would have been a considerable contribution to the road fund of the provinces.

The packet, the importance of which Freeling emphasized, was scarcely of any utility to the people of the Canadas. The service by the packets was so slow and expensive that it was not employed at all for commercial or social correspondence, the merchants in London and Liverpool using exclusively the lines of sailing vessels running between Liverpool and New York. But Freeling was obstinate and often disingenuous in maintaining his view that it was proper that the surplus revenues from the provincial post offices should be turned into the British exchequer.

The disinclination of the general post office to discuss the question of the colonial post office was not likely to suppress the subject for long. The assembly of Upper Canada had too strong a case. The political grievances from which the province was suffering were bringing into the political life of Upper Canada a group of men to voice the general dissatisfaction with the state of affairs, and so undeniable an abuse could not remain unexploited.

The house, which adopted the resolution of 1821, was on the whole favourable to the lieutenant governor and his advisers. The succeeding house, which was elected in 1825, contained a majority opposed to the government. This fact did not, however, lead to the overthrow of the lieutenant governor's advisers. They were his own choice and were in no sense responsible to the house. It was not until sixteen years later that responsible government, as now understood, was established in Canada.

The turn of affairs in 1825, which placed the control of the house in the hands of the opponents of the government had its effect on the attitude of the parties towards the provincial post office. In 1821, the lieutenant governor cordially supported the views of the house, and did what he could to make them prevail with the postmaster general. In 1825, when the post office grievance was brought up for discussion, the lieutenant governor's party upheld the position taken by the postmaster general in England.

The consequence was that, for the opposition, the post office was but one more of the many matters calling for redress, while[Pg 143] for the government party it was another element in the burden which they had to sustain in their resistance to reform.

In the beginning of 1825, William Lyon Mackenzie presented a petition to the house of assembly to have the affairs of the post office investigated. Mackenzie, who had come to Upper Canada in 1820, was engaged in business until 1824, when, impressed with the various political abuses from which the country was suffering, he abandoned what had every appearance of a successful career, and gave himself to agitation. He established a newspaper—The Colonial Advocate—in 1824, and in 1828 secured a seat in the house of assembly. These vehicles of publicity he employed in ceaseless attacks on the governing clique, which from the intimacy of the ties binding its members together was known as the Family Compact, and became the principal actor in the abortive rebellion of 1837. The post office as then managed incurred his unremitting hostility.

A committee was appointed having as chairman Captain John Matthews, who represented the county of Middlesex along with Dr. Rolph, subsequently one of the leaders of rebellion in 1837. Matthews was a retired army officer, who entertained advanced political views, which were irritating to the lieutenant governor. He was later on made to feel the lieutenant governor's resentment for his opposition. As chairman of the committee Matthews reported on the 9th of March, 1825,[203] that it was in evidence that there were abuses which would be remedied, if the post offices in the province were, as they should be, under the control and supervision of the legislature.