between the Places where they are printed and the Place of Delivery; You are to pay the Carriage-money you collect for the Riders to the several Riders who have carried such Papers in Proportion, as near as conveniently may be made, to the Distance, they have been carried by each Rider respectively.
(Signed) FRANKLIN AND HUNTER.
This order remained in force until the relations between the colonies and England and the postal service became interrupted on account of the approaching conflict of the Revolution. Then many of the newspaper publishers arranged for a private dis- tribution of their papers to country subscribers.
The reforms of Franklin and Hunter in the reorganization of the colonial post-office and in the increase of post-roads had two effects on the journalism of the period. First, there was an in- crease in letters among correspondents in the several colonies, and as these letters often contained news items of considerable importance, they not infrequently found their way into the newspapers under some such caption as "From a Gentleman Residing in Virginia"; second, the newspapers were placed on a better subscription basis, and the exchange papers, being more regular in their receipt, not only improved the news service, but also aroused a news interest in what was going on in all the colo- nies. Without this awakened interest, it might have been im- possible to have persuaded the colonies to unite for common defense in the Revolutionary Period.
LOST ELEVEN DAYS
Readers who turn the files of colonial newspapers for 1752 are often surprised at the irregularity in the matter of dating found in the papers for the first week of September of that year. The fifth issue of The Mercury, published by Hugh Gaine at New York, was dated August 31, 1752: seven days later, the sixth was dated September 18. Yet no mistake had been made; eleven days had simply been wiped out of existence by the change to the Gregorian style in figuring time, adopted the first week of September, 1752. Several writers have thought that Benjamin Franklin skipped a week in publishing his Pennsyl- vania Gazette at Philadelphia in the September of 1752. The
