Leaving the evidence of the late Postage Committee buried in
the ponderous and unwieldy Blue Book has not altogether availed the Post-office as a baulk to public scrutiny ; for the indefatigable Mr. Rowland Hill has made an analytical examen of the evidence, and published it, under the title of The State and Prospects of Penny Postage. Not only did the Committee neglect their duty of reporting, but the evidence of the chief witness was cut short ; a defect in some measure supplied by the remarks in the present pamphlet. The endeavour of the officials has been to convict Penny Postage of failure, first by inventing promises which Mr. Hill never made, to show that those promises have not been fulfilled; next, by tampering with the actual results, to disguise the amount of success which it has defied hostile ingenuity to prevent ; and finally, they seem to intend a bold manceuvre to swamp success altogether, by destroying the Postage revenue, with the malice prepense of imputing the destruction to Mr. Hill's scheme, which to the last they pertinaciously refuse to carry out. Such is the case esta- blished by the pamphlet. One amusing section of it consists of asser- tions made by the officials—by the same at different times, or by dif- ferent men in the same department—diametrically contradicting each other on the most material points, Out of its own many months the Office stands convicted, of knowing nothing, of being capable of nothing, and having no opinion—except the one general idea of dislike to pertinacious Mr. Hill, and the anticipation, which they are of course bound to make good, that his scheme would fail. And to these people Sir Robert Peel's Government leave the conduct of Post-office Reform I
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