Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
BIRMINGHAM REFORMERS AND ARTISTS—ROWLAND HILL AND THE PENNY POST—DAVID COX AND HIS PAINTINGS.
WE now come to a Birmingham reformer who may well be called the great Political Economist of Human Nature. Rowland Hill virtually commenced life in Birmingham, and here not only taught mathematics in his father's school, but learnt to apply them to a system which has brought more comfort and happiness than arithmetic can measure, not only to all the millions of the British empire, but to all the divided families of the civilized world. It is not in arithmetic, nor rhetoric, nor poetry, nor prose to give a complete idea of the benefits The Penny Post of England has conferred upon all classes of the people. Owing to the circumscribed area of "the three kingdoms," this postal system works more nearly like one of the great and beautiful agencies of Nature than anything else a human government ever put its hand to. Indeed, it works like the dew and with the dew. The distillery of the still skies above, and the distillery of the Penny Post beneath work hand in hand through the quiet hours of the night; one dropping out of the starlit atmosphere gentle dews, the other dropping for the sleeping families of the land the welcome thoughts of wakeful memory—thoughts that are to ten thousand breakfast circles in the morning what the dews are to ten thousand fields listening in thirsty silence for their fall. If London were the local centre, every family in England would be within a night's gallop of the iron horse with the London mail-bag strapped to his back; so that at the usual breakfast hour the postman might drop in a letter to season the morning meal in the most distant home in the realm. No citizen of a foreign country sojourning in England can fail to admire the quiet and beautiful working of this postal system. And thousands of foreigners have admired it to a practical effect. They have carried back to their own countries descriptions and impressions of its dispensation which have moved their governments to adopt the same system at different degrees of approximation. Cheap postage is the order of the day everywhere. Even the countries lying beyond the boundary line of Christian civilization are copying slowly the example of England; and the day may yet come, after the nations have saved some of the millions of gold now lavished on war, when the Penny Post shall reach out from London, Paris, and New York, until it touches the circumference of the globe and every point on the radii within its sweep. When that happy day shall come—when the interchange of thought and the commerce of affection, as well as the correspondence of the materialistic interests which the postal system of England has provided for her population, shall be extended to all the nations and peoples of the world, then will they know and recognize with admiration and gratitude what they owe to Rowland Hill. Indeed, every penny postage stamp put upon a letter the world around and the world through, if it does not bear his image and superscription, will bear his memory and its worth to mankind.
As no history is so liable to be lost sight of and unappreciated as that of the lives of living men, a few facts connected with the life and labours of this benefactor of his country and his race may be properly stated here. Whatever he put his hands to, he did with all his mind and strength, often forgetful of the capacities of both in his assiduous application. He gave the same unwearied but wearying attention to his profession as a teacher of mathematics, and as an organizer of system in his father's academy, that he gave to the development and prosecution of that great reform with which his name will ever be connected. His delicate health gave way under the strain of these duties, and he was obliged to retire from them in 1833. But he only changed the scene and subject of his occupation; for he was soon appointed Secretary to the South Australian Commission. In 1837 he broke ground in the great and crowning work of his life, and brought out several pamphlets on his proposed reform in the postal system of Great Britain. The chief and most effective of these brochures was one entitled "State and Prospects of Penny Postage." In this he developed the great principle which has already won such a triumph in different countries besides England. That is, uniformity of charge; or taxing weight and untaxing distance, so that the Post Office Department should no longer "levy black mail" on remote provincial towns, to punish them for their distance from London. At that time England had more distance rates, if possible, than we had in America. The lines were drawn as sharply and severely as with us. And every line was a postal frontier over which a busy and ingenious smuggling business was carried on daily, but by night more especially. When a man's house was cut through in the middle by such a line, and his parlour was on the shilling and his kitchen on the sixpenny side, of course he would post his letters from the kitchen door. Then the Post Office lost as much through the franking privilege as through this smuggling. All the Members of Parliament of both houses, besides other officials, were possessed of this privilege, and they turned it to business and personal uses of wonderful variety and extent. In the first place, the Peers and Commons count up about 1,300 members between them, or more than four times the number of the Representatives and Senators at Washington. There are more stories told than printed of the manner and extent of their use of the franking privilege. Not that they perverted and abused it more shamefully than did the American Members of Congress, but that, outnumbering our legislators by four to one, they loaded the mail-bags with four times the number of "dead-heads," or free letters that the American Post Office had to bear and charge upon honest, paid correspondence. It would be unparliamentary and uncharitable to suspect or listen to the suspicion that any M.P. ever sold any stock in his franking privilege or ever yielded to the temptation of realizing an "honest penny" out of it directly in the way of trade, but it is said to be a fact that many great business firms in the large cities found it would pay to expend large sums in returning a senior partner to Parliament, not so much in reference to the general interests of the country as to the cheapening of their commercial correspondence. Frequently larger constituencies than a single mercantile firm would have an eye to the same postal facilities; so that the frank of their member acted like a diffusive bribe over Whig and Tory of the borough that elected him.
Thus Rowland Hill, in agitating for a uniform Penny Postage, not only had all the organized red-tapeism and vis inertiæof an old and vicious system to encounter, but also a thickset and a stoutset array of vested interests to grapple with and overcome. Still, such was the force of the facts and arguments he brought forward, and such was the general interest of the great masses in his scheme, that the very year in which it was thus developed a Parliamentary committee was appointed to examine it. This committee fully appreciated its merits, and strongly recommended its adoption, not only for the great stimulus and facility it would give to mercantile correspondence, but also for its educational effect upon the lower classes in developing and exercising their intellectual faculties and social affections and intercourse. During the following session more than ten thousand petitions were presented to Parliament praying for an uniform penny postage. And the next year this great reform was realized, and Penny Postage became a power in the land and one of the great social forces of the world. Although so many and strong prescriptive interests, and so many hereditary and ancient customs and habits were arrayed against it, they yielded to its own inherent truth, right, and reason. In fact, no other reform so radical and sweeping was ever carried through all the stages of its progress to its full consummation in such a brief space of time. But although his system was adopted by Parliament, and himself appointed to supervise and direct its operation, and although virtually the whole nation favoured his plans, he had to encounter in red-tape officials that heavy, deadening, back-water resistance which clogs the strongest wheels of motion. He retired wearied but not defeated in 1843; but the great masses of the people did not allow him to retire from their grateful memory, and in 1846 he received a testimonial of their appreciation in the sum of £1300, collected from the millions virtually in his own coin, The Powerful Penny. No example in history can be found more conclusive and striking than this to illustrate and prove the policy of cheapening an article in order to extend its use. In 1837 the number of letters that passed through the Post Office was 75,000,000; in 1842 it was 360,000,000, from which time it has steadily increased by nearly the same ratio of progression. Mr. Hill was reinstated as Secretary of the Post Office in 1847, and for fifteen years laboured to perfect and extend the system he had originated, not only between England and all her colonies but all foreign nations. He was always ahead of the Government and a majority of the people in his views on this free trade of human minds, and I fully believe that he was personally in favour of establishing that Universal Ocean Penny Postage which was agitated so earnestly some twenty years ago in England. Although the reduction of ocean postage did not reach the uniform and universal penny rate, it was greatly modified under his regime, so that a single letter from London to Paris is now charged only 4d., against 1s. 2d.; while the postage to Australia, India, Canada, and all the British colonies has been reduced to 6d, for the three services, the home inland, the sea transport, and the colonial inland. This is just half way to an Ocean Penny Postage, which would make the whole charge between England and all other countries 3d, on a single letter. It was hoped that Rowland Hill would retain his post in the General Post Office until he should see the system so intimately associated to his name carried out to this extent and universality; but he may well rest and be thankful for having seen his plans worked to such magnificent results.
M. D. Hill, Esq., late Recorder of Birmingham, and elder brother of Sir Rowland Hill, applied his great legal abilities and philanthropic mind to a reform of vast importance—the improvement of prison discipline and of the whole criminal prudence of the country. The statistics he collected, and arguments and views he pressed upon the public mind as well as upon the Government, are a most valuable contribution to a movement now progressing in different countries for the better treatment of their actual and prospective criminals. Several other brothers have also distinguished themselves, some in the profession of their father, as conductors of high class schools for the education of gentlemen's sons, whilst others have been able assistants in the General Post Office in working out the postal system of Sir Rowland.
Although it redounds less to the credit of a town merely to give birth to great men than to make great men born elsewhere, still those born and raised to eminence in Birmingham present a goodly roll. We have noticed what one of these has done for his country and the world in the boon and blessing of free trade between heart and heart, mind and mind, through the Penny Post. We have called him the Political Economist of Human Nature. We now come to one of the great poets of that nature that surrounds, embosoms, sustains, and delights the human, and is to universal humanity what the physical being of man is to his mind. Such a poet was born in Birmingham, and his name was David Cox. He looked with the loving rapture of a poet's eye into the face of Nature, and then he dipped his pencil in the rainbow, and caught and fixed on canvas her sunniest gleams; and they would look so to the life, that a harvest field, flushed with the golden glory of the setting sun, seemed a living smile of her joy at the beauty of her own fair world. David Cox was born in Birmingham in 1793, and died here in 1859. He sleeps under Nature's graceful monuments in Harborne churchyard—the outspreading trees, that stretch forth their long arms and wave them to and fro over his quiet grave, and with the murmur of all their green leaves, now moved to mournful music by the soughs and sighs of the evening's breath, now touched with the thrill of the bell's voices in the old church tower, whisper their requiems over his last resting-place. He was one of the fathers of the water-colour school of art, and for many years his genius enriched and beautified the gallery of the Society in London with paintings that commanded universal admiration. Although the portraiture of Nature's face is different from the portraiture of human faces in this respect, that it changes little from year to year and century to century, whereas the human countenance is soon changed and soon disappears, never to be reproduced, still it is a delight to see the features that a landscape, we know well, presented to the artist half a century ago; to see one of Nature's sweetest smiles fifty years old still gleaming to the life on canvas, as fresh as if it were mirrored in this very morning's dew; it is pleasant to see the wheatfield reaped in our childhood with half its golden grain waving before the bent reapers, and happy children among the sheaves behind, and happy birds on wing above, and all the scenery of the harvest, all but the voices of the men and birds, alive again as they lived on the extremest verge of our quickened memory. David Cox made truth poetical in the portraits of these rural sceneries of the seasons and of the rich and picturesque suburban farms, dells, and lanes of Harborne and other Birmingham vicinities. It was this truthfulness in poetry that distinguishes his best pieces, which none appreciated more highly than his nearest neighbours. Indeed, he was their Turner, and in many of their houses his local landscapes are valued as the works of one of the most eminent artists of the country. He was also the founder of a local school of artists, and had pupils among his neighbours. One of these a merchant, of assiduous business life up to eighty years of age, found time to cultivate and exercise a genius developed under the instruction of the great painter, and he made it a dying request to be buried as near as possible to his master: and their graves lie side by side under the shade of the same tree. Another pupil, resident at Harborne, Mr. Charles Burt, has attained to an eminence as an artist almost equal to that of Cox himself.