rupt, forwarding or delaying letters as they pleased, and seldom delivering one to a villager without a personal fee.
In 1853-54, Lord Dalhousie swept away the whole antiquated fabric of obstruction, and replaced it by the modern postal system of India. He levied a uniform rate of half an áná, now equal to a half-penny (although then about three farthings) for all letters not exceeding half a tolá in weight, and for all India. The idea of thus substituting a uniform unit of weight and of charge for the whole of the vast Indian Empire, seemed to many orthodox financiers of his time to be an act of sheer folly. It was, they said, pushing Rowland Hill's scheme of a penny postage for England to an inconsequential extreme. It was not so much an extension as a reductio ad absurdum of the reform which had been effected in the postal system of Great Britain. What could be more extravagant, or indeed more unjust, than to levy the same charge on two letters, one of which was to be delivered in the adjoining street, and the other on the opposite side of India. Lord Dalhousie listened, and pursued his own course, with the following remarkable results.
Instead of Indian letters being charged at differential rates, according to distance, they are now carried throughout the length and breadth of India, for a distance sometimes exceeding 2000 miles, at
