Great Britain and Her Queen | Page 5

or two from her throne, when "sweet mercy,
nobility's true badge," has seemed to require such a descent. And her
queenly dignity has never been thereby lessened. "She never ceases to

be a Queen," says Greville a propos of this scene, "and is always the
most charming, cheerful, obliging, unaffected Queen in the world."
[Illustration: Elizabeth Fry]
That "the people" were more considered in the arrangements for this
coronation than they had been on any previous occasion of the sort was
a circumstance quite in harmony with certain other signs of the times.
"The night is darkest before the dawn," and amid all the gloom which
enshrouded the land there could be discerned the stir and movement
that herald the coming of the day. Men's minds were turning more and
more to the healing of the world's wounds. Already one great humane
enterprise had been carried through in the emancipation of the slaves in
British Colonies; already the vast work of prison reform had been well
begun, through the saintly Elizabeth Fry, whose life of faithful service
ended ere the Queen had reigned eight years. The very year of Her
Majesty's accession was signalised by two noteworthy endeavours to
put away wrong. We will turn first to that which seems the least
immediately philanthropic, although the injustice which it remedied
was trivial in appearance only, since in its everyday triviality it
weighed most heavily on the most numerous class--that of the humble
and the poor.
[Illustration: Rowland Hill]
How would the Englishman of to-day endure the former exactions of
the Post Office? The family letters of sixty years ago, written on the
largest sheets purchasable, crossed and crammed to the point of
illegibility, filled with the news of many and many a week, still witness
of the time when "a letter from London to Brighton cost eightpence, to
Aberdeen one and threepence-halfpenny, to Belfast one and fourpence";
when, "if the letter were written on more than one sheet, it came under
the operation of a higher scale of charges," and when the privilege of
franking letters, enjoyed and very largely exercised by members of
Parliament and members of the Government, had the peculiar effect of
throwing the cost of the mail service exactly on that part of the
community which was least able to bear it. The result of the injustice
was as demoralising as might have been expected. The poorer people

who desired to have tidings of distant friend or relative were driven by
the prohibitory rates of postage into all sorts of curious, not quite
honest devices, to gratify their natural desire without being too heavily
taxed for it. A brother and sister, for instance, unable to afford
themselves the costly luxury of regular correspondence, would obtain
assurance of each other's well-being by transmission through the post at
stated intervals of blank papers duly sealed and addressed: the arrival of
the postman with a missive of this kind announced to the recipient that
all was well with the sender, so the unpaid "letter" was cheerfully left
on the messenger's hands. Such an incident, coming under the notice of
Mr. Rowland Hill, impressed him with a sense of hardship and wrong
in the system that bore these fruits; and he set himself with strenuous
patience to remedy the wrong and the hardship. His scheme of reform
was worked out and laid before the public early in 1837; in the third
year of Her Majesty's reign it was first adopted in its entirety, with what
immense profit to the Government we may partly see when we contrast
the seventy-six or seventy-seven millions of paid letters delivered in
the United Kingdom during the last year of the heavy postage with the
number exceeding a thousand millions, and still increasing--delivered
yearly during the last decade; while the population has not doubled.
That the Queen's own letters carried postage under the new regime was
a fact almost us highly appreciated as Her Majesty's voluntary offer at a
later date to bear her due share of the income tax.
It is well to notice how later Postmasters General, successors of
Rowland Hill in that important office, have striven further to benefit
their countrymen. In particular, Henry Fawcett's earnest efforts to
encourage and aid habits of thrift are worthy of remembrance.
Again, it is during the first year of Her Majesty's reign that we find
Father Mathew, the Irish Capuchin friar, initiating his vast crusade
against intemperance, and by the charm of his persuasive eloquence
and unselfish enthusiasm inducing thousands upon thousands to
forswear the drink-poison that was destroying them. In two years he
succeeded in enrolling two million five hundred thousand persons on
the side of sobriety. The permanence of the good Father's immediate
work was impaired by the superstitions which his poor followers

associated with it,