At Boston, Finlay laid his plans before governor Hutchinson.[82] The interview was not encouraging. The governor declared that, in the existing temper of the people, it would be enough for the legislature to know that the governor favoured a scheme, to ensure its defeat. The New Englanders had, besides this, but moderate grounds for assisting in establishing further communication with Canada.
The proposed road would be beneficial to Massachusetts in so far as it aided colonization in the northern parts of the province, but as the tract through which the proposed Kennebec road would run lay largely in the grants of the Plymouth company, it would be this company which would be the chief beneficiary of the enterprise, and the legislature considered that the company should bear the burden of the expense.
The company were not averse from assisting, but they indulged the hope that with their interest in the legislature the government might be induced to bear the cost. Another circumstance that tended to cool the interest of the legislature was the belief that in a short time this northern country was to be detached from Massachusetts, and erected into a separate government. Altogether Finlay concluded that unless the British government undertook the scheme on the New England side, it would not be accomplished at all.
Finlay's tour of exploration was ended by his arrival in Falmouth at the beginning of October. He then entered upon the more extensive duty of inspecting the whole postal service from Maine to Georgia.[83] He travelled southward from Falmouth, inspected every post office, studied the conditions under which the mails were carried, and made a full report of his investigations to the postmaster general.
It is plain from his report that the service had deteriorated seriously since Franklin and Foxcroft had made their last inspection ten years before. Franklin, it will be remembered, had resided in England since 1764, and Foxcroft undoubtedly found it impossible to give proper attention to the post offices throughout the country, and at the same time to keep abreast of the official routine at the head office.
The postmasters on the whole impressed Finlay favourably. They understood their duties and seemed to be making a commendable struggle against the demoralization which confronted them however they turned.
Only a small proportion of the letters which circulated within the colonies passed through the post office, although their conveyance by any other means was illegal. The consequence was that the revenues of the post office were small.
At Falmouth the greater part of the letters from Boston were delivered by the masters of sailing vessels. The postmaster on one occasion attempted to enforce the law against illegal conveyance by seizing the letter bag on one of the incoming ships; but the populace made so marked a manifestation of its displeasure that he did not venture on that course a second time.
It was not so much, however, by direct defiance of the postal law, although instances of this were not wanting, as by evasions of it, that the monopoly of the post office was broken down. But in many cases the evasions were so palpable that they could deceive nobody. A popular mode of escape from the penalties attaching to the breach of the monopoly was to seek shelter under one of the exceptions which the post office act allowed.
In none of the acts, for instance, is objection made to a person sending a letter to a correspondent by his own servant, or by a friend who happened to be journeying to the place where the letter should be delivered. Another exception to the monopoly was made in favour of letters which accompanied merchandise to which letters related. Thus a merchant in filling an order for goods has always been at liberty to send with them the invoice, or any other communication, having presumable reference to them. This was the excepted article, which served the turn of those eluding the monopoly.
What Finlay saw at New Haven illustrates fairly what was going on throughout the colonies. Riders came in from other towns, their carts laden with bundles, packages, boxes and canisters, and every package had a letter attached. Some of the parcels consisted of no more than little bundles of chips, straw, or old paper, but they served their purpose. If the postmaster made objection to the number of letters they carried, the riders asserted their right to carry letters accompanying goods, and the public saw to it that neither postmaster or magistrate took too narrow a view of what constituted goods.
On the route between Boston and Newport the mail carrier was a certain Peter Mumford, who did a much larger business in the illegal conveyance of letters than as the servant of the post office. At Newport the postmaster declared that there were two post offices--the king's and Mumford's--and the latter did the larger business. There was no remedy, as the postmaster declared that whoever should attempt to check the illegal practice would be denounced as the friend of slavery and oppression and the declared enemy of America.
Many of the couriers did so large a carrying business that the conveyance of the mails became a mere incident with them. As he approached New Haven, Finlay was accosted with the inquiry whether he had overtaken the post bringing in a drove of oxen, which the courier had engaged to do, when he came in with the mail.
In all respects but one, the situation described by Finlay presented no unexpected features. There had been no general inspection since Franklin made his tour in 1763, at the time he opened the post office in Quebec.
This fact fully explains the shortcomings of the postmasters and couriers. That the postmasters were chargeable with so few irregularities in their accounts, or were open to so little censure for faults in management, is high testimony to their intelligence and fidelity to duty.
Mail couriers have always been less completely identified with the postal service than postmasters. They are held by contract, not by appointment, and their engagements are for short terms. There is nothing irregular in their practice of combining the conveyance of the mails with other means of gaining a livelihood, but in the absence of supervision there was a constant tendency to give undue attention to what should have been merely auxiliary employments of carrying passengers and parcels.
People employing the couriers demanded prompt service, while there was no person to insist on the prior claims of the post office, and indeed there were probably few people in any community at that time to whom an hour more or less was of any consequence in the receipt of their letters.
The evasion of the postmaster general's monopoly also was too common to excite particular remark. It was beyond doubt a breach of the law, but that it was wrong was a proposition to which few even good citizens gave assent, at least by their practice. Thomas Hancock made a merit of his saving the colony of Connecticut from thirty to forty shillings a year through the interest he had with certain captains, which enabled him to secure the colonial letters, as they came over in the ships, and thus prevent their passing through the post office.
In England, also, the practice was wellnigh universal. The increased rates imposed by the act of 1710 gave an immense impetus to clandestine traffic. Every pedlar and driver of public coaches lent himself to the profitable business of carrying letters for a few halfpence a letter. In London an effort was made to stop the practice by having officials of the post office frequent the roads leading into the city, for the purpose of searching the vehicles of those who had made themselves objects of suspicion.
It is interesting to note that the work for which the post office surveyors or inspectors were first appointed was to detain the mail couriers in the course of travel, and check the contents of the mail bags, and thus prevent postmasters from becoming parties, as they too frequently were, to frauds on the revenue, to their own great advantage.
As late as 1837, when Rowland Hill[84] laid his penny postage scheme before a public which was impatient for its adoption, Richard Cobden declared to a committee appointed to report on the scheme, that five-sixths of the letters passing between Manchester and London were conveyed by private hand. This state of things continued until the postage rates were brought down to a point, at which the service offered by the post office was cheaper as well as better than any other. The only certain means by which a government monopoly in a free country can maintain its position is to outbid its rivals. There is no safe dependence to be placed in legal process.
In ordinary times, then, the evasion of the exclusive privilege of the postmaster general by any community would deserve no more than passing mention. It is as part of a general boycott of the government that the action of the Americans is worthy of note.
From the time of the passage of the stamp act in 1765, the attitude of the colonies towards all schemes in which taxation by Parliament could be detected was one of resistance active or passive. When this act went into operation, the Americans bound themselves to import nothing from England, a self-imposed obligation which in the undeveloped state of their manufactures entailed much inconvenience and even distress.
There was an essential difference between the English and the American methods of avoiding the penalties for infractions of the post office law. In England, and to some extent doubtless in America as well, men engaged in the illegal conveyance of letters did their best to conceal their operations from the authorities. The efforts of a public coach driver were directed to rendering the search made by the post office inspectors fruitless. If letters were found in his possession, he suffered the legal penalties as the smuggler does to-day. It was one of the chances of his trade.
In the colonies men who were bent on circumventing the post office pursued another course. They indulged their taste for legal technicalities by carrying their letters openly, and maintaining that the packages which accompanied them took them outside the monopoly, and they gave scope to their humour by making the packages as ridiculous as possible. They incurred no great risk, for the active spirits in every community threatened a prosecutor with a coat of tar and feathers.
The stamp act was repealed in the year following its enactment, and for the moment trade resumed its wonted course. But it was not for long. The British government was determined that the legislative supremacy of parliament should be recognized in America, and the colonies were equally persistent in their denial of this supremacy; and in the conflict which ensued the principle weapons employed by the Americans until the outbreak of the war were non-importation and non-exportation agreements.
As the British merchant exercised a preponderating influence with the government, the stoppage of trade with America, as the result of a constitutional dispute, was an effective instrument in making the government consider the situation seriously. The difficulty with the government was to understand the attitude of mind which prevailed among the Americans.
The government had no quarrel with the principle that representation should be a condition of taxation. It would have asserted the principle on any occasion, but it could not see that the course it was pursuing was a violation of that principle. Parliament, it declared, was the great council of the nation, representing those parts beyond the sea as well as those at home, and its measures bound the whole nation.
It was still, it must be remembered, half a century before the time when the agitations which preceded the great reform bill of 1832 had familiarized the country with the distinction between virtual and actual representation. The British parliament was far from being, and indeed made no pretence of being a representative assembly in the sense in which the phrase is now used. The right to send members to parliament had for centuries been exercised by the electors of counties and certain ancient boroughs, and no enlargement of the representation was made from 1677 until 1832,[85] in spite of the great changes in population and industrial importance which had taken place in the course of time.
Great manufacturing towns such as Manchester and Leeds sent no members to represent them in parliament, while Old Sarum which did not contain a single house elected two members. To a people, who saw nothing in this state of things inconsistent with the theory of representative government, the colonial view would be quite incomprehensible.
The colonist on the other hand with his strict representation in town meetings and colonial assemblies, and without the historical aids to an understanding of the point of view of the home government, saw little of a truly representative character in the British system. But he did see, what the home government did not, that a body of distinct and separate interests had grown up in America of which parliament had a very inaccurate conception, and with which it was in no way qualified to deal.
The attitude of the colonists did not appear to the government to be quite free from insincerity. For half a century and more, the government declared, the colonists had been subject to taxes in the shape of post office charges imposed by the act of 1710, and they had never raised a question.
In the Newcastle correspondence, there is a paper, dated 1765, containing a discussion on the legality of a tax on the trade with the Spanish West Indies. In the course of the paper it is asserted that parliament, by the post office act of Queen Anne, imposed an internal tax on the colonies without their presuming to dispute the jurisdiction of parliament over them.
The disturbances in America which followed upon the attempts to enforce the stamp act surprised and alarmed the government, and a committee of parliament was appointed to consider what their future course would be.
Franklin who, as the representative of several of the colonies, had been in London for a considerable time, was among the witnesses examined by the committee. His examination took a wide range, but the point of interest was the question as to what ground in principle the Americans stood upon in objecting to the stamp act, since they had accepted the post office act of 1710.
For Franklin this was a crucial question, as he had been not only administering the post office in America for twelve years past, but he did not conceal his satisfaction that by his management he had been able for several years to send substantial sums to Great Britain as profits from the institution.
Franklin answered the questions with much ingenuity. The money paid for the postage of a letter was not in the nature of a tax; it was merely a _quantum meruit_ for a service done; no person was compellable to pay the money if he did not choose to receive the service. A man might still, as before the act, send his letter by a servant, a special messenger, or a friend, if he thought it safer and cheaper.
The answer would have been quite just, if the postmaster general of England had not held a monopoly of letter carrying in America. While a person is free to use or not to use a certain service, the charge for the service is not in the nature of a tax. If a person does not like the price demanded by the post office for its services, he may seek other means of having his letters carried. But the post office act does not leave a person free to employ other agencies for the conveyance of his letters. The monopoly has attached to it heavy penalties for its infringement.
It is true, as Franklin said, that the post office act leaves it open to a man to employ a servant, special messenger, or friend in the course of his travel, to carry his letters. But the mention of these agencies shows the absurdity of Franklin's contention. A merchant in New York having business to transact by letter with a customer in Boston or Philadelphia could not afford to pay the expenses of his messenger or servant unless the transaction were one of considerable magnitude. Nor could he await the chance of a friend's making a visit to either of these places. He might, if he were free to do so, have entrusted his letters to a coach driver who made a business of passing between New York and the other two towns, but the monopoly of the post office stood in his way, and the coachman would have made himself liable to a heavy fine.
In short, if the merchant had to correspond with neighbouring places he was compelled to employ the post office. With a country so extended and so highly civilized as the American colonies were at that day, a postal system was an absolute necessity; and if the system maintained by the government were protected by a monopoly, its charges were a tax on the users of the system in so far as those charges exceeded the strict cost of carrying on the service.
Furthermore, since the post office act of 1710 was imposed on the colonies without their consent, and since Franklin's good management had enabled him to pay all the expenses of the service and send a considerable surplus to England for some years past, it is plain that to the extent of the yearly surplus the colonies had been subject to a tax laid on them without their consent, and that Franklin himself was the tax gatherer. This was undoubtedly where the point lay in the question which was asked of Franklin.
Franklin's views on the constitutionality of the post office charges were part and parcel of his views on taxation generally. For instance, he drew a clear line of distinction between a tax on imported goods and an internal tax such as the stamp act. A duty on imported goods it was permissible for parliament to impose on the colonies, while an internal tax could not properly be levied without consent.
The stamp act required that all commercial and legal documents and newspapers should be written or printed upon stamped paper which was sold by agents of the government at varying prices prescribed by the law. As this was a tax which could not be avoided so long as men carried on their business in the ordinary way and by the ordinary means, it was one for which the consent of the colonies was necessary.
An import tax stood on a different footing. It was simply one of the elements entering into the price of the goods imported. If people objected to the price as enhanced by the tax, it was open to them to decline to buy the goods. A tax of this sort was in Franklin's view quite within the powers of the sovereign state.
The ultimate test applied by Franklin to determine whether a tax could in a given case be constitutionally imposed, was whether or not there was a legal mode of escape from the tax. If the tax were an avoidable one, it was constitutional, since submission to it implied consent. If, on the other hand, the tax were one which from the necessities of the case could not be avoided, it ought not to be imposed until it had been assented to by the people.
Opinions may differ as to which of the two classes the application of the test would place postal charges in. They constituted a tax beyond any question since they turned into the government a surplus of revenue after all expenses had been met. Whether they were to be regarded as an avoidable tax to be paid or not as one cared to employ the services of a post office or not, or whether as a tax which the circumstances of the community made it necessary to accept, will depend on one's views as to whether a post office is indispensable to the community.
It is difficult to see how Franklin, who of all men of his generation knew best the requirements of a highly developed industrial community, could believe that the necessities for the interchange of correspondence on the part of a people like the American colonists could be satisfied by private messengers, or travelling friends, or indeed by any agency less comprehensive than a national postal system.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] _Can. Arch._. C. 11, LXIV. 110 (Report of progress by grand voyer).
[67] _Memoires de la Societe Historique de Montreal_, 1870, pt. 5. I.
150.
[68] _Ordonnances des Intendants_, I. 54, and IX. 109.