existing in the first quarter of the present century. Looking at the regulations of 1823, we find that each Member of Parliament was permitted to receive as many as fifteen and to send as many as ten letters in each day, such letters not exceeding one ounce in weight. At the then rates of postage this was a most handsome privilege. In the year 1827 the Peers enjoying this extent of free postage numbered over four hundred, and the Commons over six hundred and fifty. In addition to these, certain Members of the Government and other high officials had the privilege of sending free any number of letters without restriction as to weight. These persons were, in 1828, nearly a hundred in number.

How the privilege was turned to commercial account is explained in Mackenzie's, Reminiscences of Glasgow. Referring to the Ship Bank of that city, which had its existence in the first quarter of our century, and to one of the partners, Mr. John Buchanan of Ardoch, who was also Member of Parliament for Dumbartonshire, the author makes the following statement: "From his position as Member of Parliament, he enjoyed the privilege of franking the letters of the bank to the extent of fourteen per diem. This was a great boon; it saved the bank some hundreds of pounds per annum for postages. It was, moreover, regarded as a mighty honour."

Great abuses were perpetrated even upon the abuse itself. Franks were given away freely to other persons for their use, they were even sold, and, moreover, they were forged. Senex, in his notes on Glasgow Past and Present, describes how this was managed in Ireland. "I remember," says he, "about sixty years ago, an old Irish lady told me that she seldom paid any postage for letters, and that her correspondence never cost her friends anything. I inquired how she managed that. 'Oh,' said she, 'I just wrote "Free, J. Suttie," in the corner of the cover of the letter, and then, sure, nothing more was charged for it.' I said, 'Were you not afraid of being hanged for forgery?' 'Oh, dear me, no,' she replied; 'nobody ever heard of a lady being hanged in Ireland, and troth, I just did what everybody else did.'" But the spirit of inquiry was beginning to assert itself in the first half of the century, and the franking privilege disappeared with the dawn of cheap postage.

Public opinion had as yet no active existence throughout our Commonwealth, nor had the light spread so as to show up all the abuses. And how true is Buckle's observation in his History of Civilisation that all recent legislation is the undoing of bad laws made in the interest of certain classes. How could there be an active public opinion in the conditions of the times? Everybody was shut off from everybody else. Hear further what Mackenzie says in his History of the Nineteenth Century, referring to the end of last century: "The seclusion resulting from the absence of roads rendered it necessary that every little community, in some measure every family, should produce all that it required to consume. The peasant raised his own food; he grew his own flax or wool; his wife or daughter spun it; and a neighbour wove it into cloth. He learned to extract dyes from plants which grew near his cottage. He required to be independent of the external world from which he was effectively shut out. Commerce was impossible until men could find the means of transferring commodities from the place where they were produced to the place where there were people willing to make use of them." So much for the difficulty of exchanging ordinary produce. The exchange of thought suffered in a like fashion.

In the first half of the present century severe restrictions were placed upon the spread of news, not only by the heavy postage for letter correspondence, but by the equally heavy newspaper tax. Referring to this latter hindrance to the spread of light Mackenzie says: "The newspaper is the natural enemy of despotic government, and was treated as such in England. Down to 1765 the duty imposed was only one penny, but as newspapers grew in influence the restraining tax was increased from time to time, until in 1815 it reached the maximum of fourpence." At this figure the tax seems to have continued many years, for under the year 1836 Mackenzie refers to it as such, and remarks, "that this rendered the newspaper a very occasional luxury to the working man; that the annual circulation of newspapers in the United Kingdom was no more than thirty-six million copies, and that these had only three hundred thousand readers."

At the present time the combined annual circulation of a couple of the leading newspapers in Scotland would equal the entire newspaper circulation of the kingdom little more than fifty years ago. In the year 1799, which is less than a hundred years ago, the Edinburgh Evening Courant and the Glasgow Courier, two very small newspapers, were sold at sixpence a copy, each bearing a Government stamp of the value of threehalf-pence. Is it surprising, under these conditions, that few newspapers should circulate, and that news should travel slowly throughout the country?

But the growth of newspapers to their present magnificent proportions is a thing of quite recent times, for even so lately as 1857 the Scotsman, then sold unstamped for a penny, weighed only about three-quarters of an ounce, while to-day the same paper, which continues to be sold for a penny, weighs fully four and a half ounces. And other newspapers throughout the country have no doubt swelled their columns to a somewhat similar degree.

A very good instance of the small amount of personal travelling indulged in by the people a century ago is given by Cleland in his Annals of Glasgow. Writing in the year 1816, he says: "It has been calculated that, previous to the erection of steamboats, not more than fifty persons passed and repassed from Glasgow to Greenock in one day, whereas it is now supposed that there are from four to five hundred passes and repasses in the same period." In the present day a single steamboat sailing from the Broomielaw, Glasgow, will often carry far more passengers to Greenock, or beyond Greenock, than the whole passengers travelling between the towns named in one day in 1816. For example, the tourist steamer Columba is certificated to carry some 1800 passengers.

In 1792 the principal mails to and from London were carried by mail-coaches, which were then running between the Metropolis and some score of the chief towns in the country at the speed of seven or eight miles an hour; and so far as direct mails were concerned the towns in question kept up relations with London under the conditions of speed just described. But the cross post service—that is, the service between places not lying in the main routes out of London—was not yet developed, and these cross post towns were beyond the reach of anything like early information of what was going on, not, let us say, in the world at large, but in their own country. The people in these towns had to patiently await the laggard arrival of news from the greater centres of activity; and when it did arrive it probably came to hand in a very imperfect form, or so late as to be useless for any purpose of combined action or criticism.

Dr. James Russell, in his Reminiscences of Yarrow, describes how tardy and uncertain the mail service by post was in the early years of the present century; and what he says is a severe contrast to the service of the present time, which provides for the delivery of letters, generally daily, in every hamlet in the country. Dr. Russell writes:—

"Since I remember