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, much against his desire. Not only were
the medals which he gave as badges to his vowed abstainers regarded
as infallible talismans from the hand of a saint, but the giver was
credited with miraculous powers such as only a Divine Being could
exercise, and which he disclaimed in vain--extravagances too likely
to discredit his enterprise with more soberly judging persons than
the imaginative Celts who were his earliest converts. But,
notwithstanding every drawback, his action was most important, and
deserves grateful memory. We may see in it the inception of that
great movement whose indirect influence in reforming social habits
and restraining excess had at least equalled its direct power for
good on its pledged adherents. Though it is still unhappily true that
drunkenness slays its tens of thousands among us, and largely helps
to people our workhouses, our madhouses, and our gaols, yet the fiend
walks not now, as it used to do, in unfettered freedom. It is no
longer a fashionable vice, excused and half approved as the natural
expression of joviality and good-fellowship; peers and commoners of
every degree no longer join daily in the "heavy-headed revel" whose
deep-dyed stain seems to have soaked through every page of our
last-century annals. And it would appear as though the vice were not
only held from increasing, but were actually on the decrease. The
statistics of the last decade show that the consumption of alcohol is
diminishing, and that of true food-stuffs proportionally rising.

[Illustration: Father Mathew]

There were other enterprises now set on foot, by no means directly
philanthropic in their aim, which contemplated utility more than
virtue or justice--enterprises whose vast effects are yet
unexhausted, and which have so modified the conditions of human
existence as to make the new reign virtually a new epoch. As to the
real benefit of these immense changes, opinion is somewhat divided;
but the majority would doubtless vote in their favour. The first
railway in England, that between Liverpool and Manchester, had been
opened in 1830, the day of its opening being made darkly memorable by
the accident fatal to Mr. Huskisson, as though the new era must be
inaugurated by a sacrifice. Three years later there was but this one
railway in England, and one, seven miles long, in Scotland. But in
1837 the Liverpool and Birmingham line was opened; in 1838 the London
and Birmingham and the Liverpool and Preston lines, and an Act was
passed for transmitting the mails by rail; in 1839 there was the
opening of the London and Croydon line. The ball was set fairly
rolling, and the supersession of ancient modes of communication was a
question of time merely. The advance of the new system was much
accelerated at the outset by the fact that railway enterprise became
the favourite field for speculation, men being attracted by the
novelty and tempted by exaggerated prospects of profit; and the mania
was followed, like other manias, with results largely disastrous to
the speculators and to commerce. But through years of good fortune
and of bad fortune the iron network has continued to spread itself,
until all the land lies embraced in its ramifications; and it is
spreading still, like some strange organism the one condition of
whose life is reproduction, knitting the greatest centres of commerce
with the loneliest and remotest villages that were wont to lie far
out of the travelled ways of men, and bringing _Ultima Thule_ into
touch with London.

[Illustration: George Stephenson]

Meanwhile the steam service by sea has advanced almost with that by
land. In 1838 three steamships crossed the Atlantic between this