Subject to the approval of the postmaster general, the deputies opened all post offices, appointed all postmasters and other officers of the department, and made all contracts for the conveyance of the mails.
Until Stayner's time, the department at home exercised a watchful oversight in one particular. It insisted that the deputy postmaster general should not extend the system, or increase the accommodation within it, unless he could satisfy St. Martins-le-Grand that the additional outlay required should be met by a corresponding increase in the revenue. Assured on this point, the department gave the deputies a practically free hand.
Insistence on the point of finances brought the general post office into sharp collision with the colonial legislatures for a number of years.
But shortly after Stayner's assumption of office, the department in London loosened the reins, and directed him to study the wants of the rising communities, and extend postal accommodation to whatever districts seemed to him to require it.
The confidence bestowed by the postmaster general on his young deputy in the Canadas was not misplaced. Stayner was a man of energy and authority, who had grown up in the service under the administration of his father-in-law, who was his predecessor in office, and his loyalty to the interests of both the postmaster general and the community he served stood unquestioned. With his appointment to his high office, he fell heir to a dispute which had been waged for a number of years between the general post office and the legislatures of Upper and Lower Canada, involving the legal right of the post office to do business in the colonies under existing conditions.
Stayner was fortunate in finding in each province differences between the administration and the houses of assembly, which gave little promise of settlement, and he promptly attached himself to the side of the administration. This, indeed, was the only course open to him, in view of his accountability to a department, which, in according him a certain freedom of action, took jealous heed that he should not abuse it.
But Stayner had important interests of his own, which called for protection by the government. His extra-official emoluments--from the postage on newspapers, and from his agency for the collection of United States postage, due in Canada--now far exceeding his official salary, began to excite public attention, and he required all the support he could gather to himself, to enable him to brave it out with the assemblies, when they insisted on his showing by what right he took these emoluments.
His position, however repugnant to popular notions, was officially unassailable, and as he managed to identify his interests with those of the administrations, the governors of the two provinces remained steadily his friends and protectors. He had even the gratification of being commended for his great services by the assembly of Upper Canada in 1837.
But a change was coming for Stayner, and indeed had come. Ever since the amount and the sources of his income became known to the home government, there had been disapprobation. The secretary of the post office, a large part of whose income had been derived from similar extra-official sources, deprecated the criticism which began to spring up, and the postmaster general weakly and reluctantly agreed that Stayner's exceptional services entitled him to exceptional emoluments.
The colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, however, was of another mind. The two provinces were seething with dissatisfaction, and it was not clear to him in what the grievances of the colonials consisted. A committee of the house of commons had sat in 1828, heard evidence, and reported, and the leaders of the assembly in Lower Canada had declared that if the recommendations of the committee were carried into effect, the province would be content.
Guiding his policy by that report, and seeking every opportunity to make good its findings, the colonial secretary observed that the political dissatisfaction and unrest, so far from disappearing, was spreading year by year. His bewilderment sharpened his eyes, and as they rested on Stayner's case, he saw a condition which offended his sense of justice, and he at once demanded of the postmaster general that he should remove this obvious wrong.
For a time Stayner's tactics, or his luck, held him scatheless. The postmaster general and the colonial secretary had agreed that the remedy for all the ills that afflicted the post office was to be provided by the bill adopted by the imperial parliament in 1834. This bill, however, could not become operative until the acceptance by the several colonial legislatures of a common measure for the regulation of the post office in the several provinces by the postmaster general of England. As all the colonies had rejected this measure, the situation remained unchanged.
Stayner continued to take his exorbitant emoluments, and the government was helpless. The postmaster general asked the colonial secretary to furnish him with an expedient for settling the matter, but the colonial secretary could think of nothing, to which overriding legal or political objections could not be made. While, however, Stayner enjoyed immunity from attacks by the government, he was a marked man, and when Poulett Thomson came to Canada, he lost no time in making Stayner realize that the period of his exceptional fortunes was at an end.
Poulett Thomson's special mission to Canada was to lay the foundations of responsible government in the country, and he began by taking things into his own hands. In dealing with the post office he sent for Stayner, and, instead of treating him as an officer of independent authority, Thomson informed Stayner that it was his intention to reform the post office in its construction and duties.
All the governor general required of Stayner was that the latter should furnish him with any information he considered necessary. Although Thomson had never had any actual experience in the workings of a post office he had opportunities of acquiring a sound theoretical knowledge on the subject. He was a member of the committee of the house of commons which was appointed in 1837 to examine the proposition of Rowland Hill for penny postage.
As Hill's scheme involved an entire change in post office methods, the _modus operandi_ at that time pursued was thoroughly set out to the committee, its weaknesses exposed, and the merits of the new proposition fully discussed. No observant man could attend the work of that committee without gaining definite views as to the principles upon which a post office should be conducted.
In June 1840, Stayner reported to the secretary of the general post office a state of affairs that indicated that Thomson had taken the direction of post office affairs into his own hands. He had ordered Stayner to enter into negotiations for the conveyance of mails by steamer between Quebec and Montreal, and upon lake Ontario, and when the negotiations failed, he expressed a determination to obtain authority to build vessels for post office purposes. He also directed Stayner to draw up a bill for the administration of the post office in British North America upon principles to be determined by the governor.
The colonial secretary, in July, instructed the governor to appoint a commission to investigate and report upon the post office in the colonies in all its bearings. The committee as appointed consisted of Dowling, legal adviser to the governor, Davidson, senior commissioner of crown lands, and Stayner.
In point of ability the committee was a competent one. Its members all had that sort of experience in public affairs, which would enable them to apprize fairly the mass of information laid before them--evidence which would satisfy the public as to the justice of their conclusions.
But having in mind the aims of the committee, its composition was not such as to give hope for harmonious co-operation among its members. The colonial secretary in instructing the governor general to appoint the committee, directed that it should investigate and report on the state of the British North American post office, including its administration.
The work of the committee was necessarily a scrutiny into the methods of the administration of Stayner, and involved an attitude of defence on his part. And the other members of the committee did not fail to make him feel the difficulty of his dual position. Although he signed the report as a commissioner, he appended a note to it stating that he did so, merely because he conceived it to be his duty as a commissioner.
But he also intimated that he was far from agreeing with all the conclusions of his associates; and a few months later he presented a statement to the governor general, pointing out the respects in which he differed from the other commissioners, and defending himself against charges which were set forth in the report.
The committee entered upon their work by calling upon the deputy postmasters general of Canada and the Maritime provinces for a body of statistics and other matter, which, when furnished, provided them with a survey of the whole colonial system, and its methods of operation.
Detailed information was given in tabular form of every post office in the colonies--the name and date of appointment of its postmaster, the revenue of the office, and the several items that composed the postmaster's income; and of every mail route, with its cost of maintenance. All regulations for the guidance of postmasters in the management of their offices were submitted to the commission.
The commissioners addressed circular letters to all the postmasters, and to prominent people in every section of the colonies, inviting them to give their views on the post offices in their locality, and asking particularly as to the extent letters were carried by agencies other than the post office, and their opinions as to why these other agencies were employed in preference to the post office.
The information obtained was most voluminous, and the report of the commission based upon it was comprehensive.[264] It began with a historical sketch of the post office in the colonies, from its origin down to the time of the commission; passed on to a survey of the institution as it then stood; pointed out the defects they discovered in its arrangements; and concluded by a number of recommendations for the removal of the defects, and the improvement of the system.
The defects which most impressed the commissioners were the want of uniformity within the system, and the uncontrolled power of the representatives of the postmaster general in the colonies. As illustrating the lack of uniformity, they pointed out that though the colonies were in postal theory an undivided whole, they were under the control of two deputies of the postmaster general, who were entirely independent of one another, and that no effort seemed to have been made to co-ordinate the practice in the two jurisdictions.
The absence of organization was more noticeable in the Maritime provinces, a condition which the commissioners attributed to the failure of the deputy at Halifax to establish general regulations, and to the want of travelling surveyors or inspectors, who might have introduced uniformity of practice among the postmasters.
A striking instance of unauthorized variation from usual post office practice was the existence of way offices. These were, to all intents and purposes, post offices, and yet they had no official recognition as such.
These way offices were set up at any convenient place along the line of the post roads. They were put in operation, sometimes by local magistrates, or other people of importance in the districts; sometimes by neighbouring postmasters, and sometimes by the deputy postmaster general. They had no accounting relations with the head of the department, but carried on their work under the control of an adjacent postmaster who was held responsible for the postage collected by them.
In spite of their anomalous character, these way offices had a usefulness of their own; for they were not abolished until after the Nova Scotia post office was absorbed in the post office department of the dominion in 1867.
The commission in support of their second conclusion, that the power of the deputies of the postmaster general were subject to no practical control, and that the abuses usually associated with irresponsibility were not absent from the administration of the colonial post office, submitted two cases which had come under their notice, and which seemed to show that in these cases at least Stayner was chargeable with maladministration and nepotism.
Stayner in his rejoinder defended himself with vigour and success against the imputations of his colleagues, and retorted upon Dowling, the chairman, with charges of unfairness and studied discourtesy towards himself. The bearing of Dowling was so offensive that Stayner was with difficulty restrained from severing his relations with the commission.
The remedies proposed by the commission for the two cardinal defects to which they had drawn attention, were simple and efficacious. They would place the whole colonial postal system in the hands of a single deputy postmaster general, who should own responsibility, not only to his official superior in England, but also, in all points which did not conflict with his primary duty, to the executive heads of the several provinces, so far as related to the parts of the system within their respective jurisdictions.
The headquarters of the deputy postmaster general, the commission urged, should be at the capital of the province of Canada, and he should be under the orders of the governor general. The authority of the deputy postmaster general in the other provinces should be vested in local inspectors, whose relations with the lieutenant governors were to be identical with those which should subsist between the deputy postmaster general and the governor general.
In cases occurring in the other provinces, which appeared to transcend the powers of the local inspectors, the lieutenant governors might correspond with the governor general, and the inspectors with the deputy. Stayner objected to the plan proposed, in so far as it took the appointments to postmasterships and other offices out of the hands of the representative of the postmaster general, and made them the subject of political patronage.
Having disposed of the questions relating to the organization and administration of the department, the commissioners proceeded to discuss matters bearing upon its operations.
The first of these was the rates of postage. In dealing with this subject the commission had before them a mass of evidence from all parts of the colonies, which convinced them that the great bulk of the letters exchanged, did not pass through the post office. It was asserted by responsible persons that, in some parts of the country, scarcely ten per cent. of the letters written were conveyed by the post office, and in few cases was the estimate of letters carried by private means less than fifty per cent.
Though various other reasons were given for this systematic evasion of the only lawful means of conveying letters--the infrequency of the couriers' services, and the public distrust in the security of the mails--there was practical unanimity in the declaration that the chief obstacle in the way of the public's using the post office was the excessive rates of postage.
The commission found that there was a strong sentiment among their correspondents, favouring the adoption of the system then recently introduced into England by the genius of Rowland Hill. Until 1840, the postal rates in England were substantially the same as those which hampered the post office in the colonies; and the general avoidance of the post office by the merchants and other writers of letters in that country was as marked as it was in Canada.
Richard Cobden declared that not one-sixth of the letters exchanged in England were transmitted through the post office, and other observers of equal authority bore similar emphatic testimony. The displacement of the complicated system of charges based on the number of enclosures and the distance the letters were carried, and the adoption of a penny rate carrying letters to all parts of the United Kingdom, immediately turned all the streams of correspondence into the channels of the post office.
Not only were the private letter-carrying agencies put out of business, but the low, easily comprehended rate called into existence a vast body of new correspondence.
Few people in Canada believed in the possibility of a rate as low as a penny for the Canadian post office, but many were attracted by the fascination of a uniform charge even though it should be higher than that, which was so vastly augmenting correspondence in England.
To all such, whether the uniform rate they advocated were a penny or higher, the commission addressed themselves, pointing out that the geographical, social and industrial differences between England and the colonies, made it impracticable to base an argument for the one upon the experience of the other.
Uniform penny postage was an immediate success in the United Kingdom because in the United Kingdom there were three thickly-populated countries, with highly developed social and industrial systems. Hill discovered, by a study of the postal statistics laid before the house of commons, that in consequence of the great volume of correspondence exchanged, the comparatively short distances letters were as a rule carried, and the highly developed system of transportation, the average cost of carrying a letter in the United Kingdom did not exceed one farthing. A sum equally small covered the expenses of administration and the maintenance of post offices.
A further discovery of equal importance, which surprised Hill as much as it did anybody, was that the difference in expense between carrying a letter the shortest and the longest possible distances in the kingdom was so small that it could not be expressed in the least valuable coin in use.
In these facts lay the whole case for uniform penny postage. At a penny a letter, there was a clear profit to the post office, and the augmentation in the number of letters as a result of this inducement to correspondence made almost any imaginable profits possible; and the insignificant difference in cost between carrying letters long and short distances, led inevitably to the ideal uniform rate.
The conditions in the British North American colonies were in all respects the reverse of those existing in England. The vast extent of their territories, the sparseness of their populations, and their undeveloped state, socially and industrially, all combined to make the postal system very costly, and the returns meagre; and the great, almost unsettled, stretches between the centres of population made the difference in the cost of conveyance between long and short distances very considerable.
The commission, with such statistics as were available before them, estimated that the average expense of delivering a letter was threepence for conveyance, and twopence-halfpenny for overhead and maintenance charges. These figures showed the impracticability of either low or uniform postage rates, unless the legislatures were willing to take on themselves the yearly deficits, which were certain to occur.
The commission, however, were prepared to recommend considerable reductions in the charges, even though these should result in a noticeable shrinkage in the revenue. Indeed, it seemed to them a distinct advantage that the revenue should be brought down to a point, at which it would no more than meet the expenses. They took it as settled that the British government would adhere to the principle of the imperial bill of 1834, under which the surplus revenues were to be divided among the colonies; and they foresaw serious difficulties among the provinces in dealing with the problem of distributing the surplus.
The rates they recommended--ranging from twopence a letter when the conveyance did not exceed thirty miles up to one shilling for a distance over three hundred miles--were much lower than those charged at that time by the post office.
Dealing with the question of newspaper postage, the commission condemned the impropriety of allowing the sums accruing under this head to pass into the pockets of the deputies of the postmaster general, and recommended that newspapers should be charged at the rate of one-halfpenny each, and that the proceeds should go with the other postage into the treasury.