Part 54

Jacques: What remains is to pay the postage. The servant is sent to the grocer for change. After a delay of twenty minutes he returns, and the postman is at length set free, and rushes from door to door, to go through the same ceremony at each.

John: Go on.

Jacques: He returns to the post-office. He counts and recounts with the postmaster. He returns the letters refused, and gets repayment of his advances for these. He reports the objections of the parties with reference to weight and distance.

John: Go on.

Jacques: The postmaster has to refer to the registers, letter-bags, and special slips, in order to make up an account of the letters which have been refused.

John: Go on, if you please.

Jacques: I am thankful I am not a postmaster. We now come to accounts in dozens and scores at the end of the month; to contrivances invented not only to establish, but to check and control a minute responsibility, involving a total of 50 millions of francs, made up of postages amounting on an average to 43 centimes each (less than 4d.), and of 116 millions of letters, each of which may belong to one or other of 242 categories.

John: A very complicated simplicity truly! The man who has resolved this problem must have a hundred times more genius than your Mons. Piron or our Rowland Hill.

Jacques: Well, you seem to laugh at our system. Would you explain yours to me?

John: In England, the government causes to be sold all over the country, wherever it is judged useful, stamps, envelopes, and covers at a penny apiece.

Jacques: And after that?

John: You write your letter, fold it, put it in the envelope, and throw it into the post-office.

Jacques: And after that?

John: "After that"--why, that is the whole affair. We have nothing to do with distances, bulletins, registers, control, or accounting; we have no money to give or to receive, and no concern with hieroglyphics, discussions, interpretations, etc., etc.

Jacques: Truly this is very simple. But is it not too much so? An infant might understand it. But such reforms as you describe stifle the genius of great administrators. For my own part, I stick to the French mode of going to work. And then your uniform rate has the greatest of all faults. It is unjust.

John: How so?

Jacques: Because it is unjust to charge as much for a letter addressed to the immediate neighbourhood, as for one which you carry three hundred miles.

John: At all events you will allow that the injustice goes no further than to the extent of a penny.

Jacques: No matter--it is still injustice.

John: Besides, the injustice, which at the outside cannot extend beyond a penny in any particular case, disappears when you take into account the entire correspondence of any individual citizen who sends his letters sometimes to a great distance and sometimes to places in the immediate vicinity.

Jacques: I adhere to my opinion. The injustice is lessened--infinitely lessened, if you will; it is inappreciable, infinitesimal, homoeopathic; but it exists.

John: Does your government make you pay dearer for an ounce of tobacco which you buy in the Rue de Clichy than for the same quantity retailed on the Quai d'Orsay?

Jacques: What connexion is there between the two subjects of comparison?

John: In the one case as in the other, the cost of transport must be taken into account. Mathematically, it would be just that each pinch of snuff should be dearer in the Rue de Clichy than on the Quai d'Orsay by the millionth part of a farthing.

Jacques: True; I don't dispute that it may be so.

John: Let me add, that your postal system is just only in appearance. Two houses stand side by side, but one of them happens to be within, and the other just outside, the zone or postal district. The one pays a penny more than the other, just equal to the entire postage in England. You see, then, that with you injustice is committed on a much greater scale than with us.

Jacques: That is so. My objection does not amount to much; but the loss of revenue still remains to be taken into account.

Here I ceased to listen to the two interlocutors. It turned out, however, that Jacques Bonhomme was entirely converted; for some days afterwards, the Report of M. Vuitry having made its appearance, Jacques wrote the following letter to that honourable legislator:--