



Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Eric Skeet, The Philatelic
Digital Library Project at http://www.tpdlp.net and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)







Transcriber's Notes:

(1) Obvious spelling, punctuation, and typographical errors have been
corrected.

(2) Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

(3) Table V in the Appendix has been split into two parts (Scotland and
Ireland), in view of its page width.

____________________________________________




THE HISTORY OF
THE BRITISH POST OFFICE

BY
J. C. HEMMEON, PH.D.

_PUBLISHED FROM THE INCOME OF THE
WILLIAM H. BALDWIN, JR., 1885, FUND_

[Illustration]

CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
1912




COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published January 1912_




PREFACE


In justice to those principles which influenced the policy of the Post
Office before the introduction of penny postage, it is perhaps
unnecessary to call attention to the fact that no opinion as to their
desirability or otherwise is justifiable which does not take into
consideration the conditions and prejudices which then prevailed. Some
of the earlier writers on the Post Office have made the mistake of
condemning everything which has not satisfied the measure of their own
particular rule. If there is anything that the historical treatment of a
subject teaches the investigator it is an appreciation of the fact that
different conditions call for different methods of treatment. For
example, the introduction of cheap postage