the session of 1839, with the intention of relieving the embarrassments of the government in Jamaica. The emancipation of the blacks remained imperfect in that island; the planters composing the representative assembly of the colony found it difficult to accustom themselves to the equality which recent laws had granted to their former slaves.

The government and the legislative council protected the negroes against the oppression still practised against them, the illegality of which they themselves did not always understand. To put an end to the conflict between the two powers, the ministry proposed to suspend, for a period of five years, the constitution of the colony. This measure, necessary perhaps, but dangerously anti-liberal, was attacked simultaneously by the Tories and by a certain number of the radicals. The administration was already tottering, and a majority of only five was announced in favor of the law. The ministry resigned. The queen took counsel with the Duke of Wellington, who advised her to send for Sir Robert Peel, assuring her that the new administration would encounter its chief difficulties in the House of Commons.

The chief difficulty, however, was to arise from a different quarter; it was the queen herself who was to become the obstacle in the formation of the Tory Cabinet. Sir Robert Peel readily made his selection, and the queen offered no objection to the persons proposed, although she had never scrupled to say from the first how much she regretted the Whigs, while yielding without hesitation to the constitutional rule which required her to part with them. But the demands of Sir Robert Peel extended to the household of the queen; he felt the serious disadvantages of leaving the queen surrounded by the wives and sisters of his political opponents, and he requested the dismissal of Lady Normanby and the Duchess of Sutherland. The queen was attached to her ladies. It appeared to her that her

entire household would be forever subject to change at each change of ministry. Her pride and her affection both objected to what she considered the unreasonable claims of Sir Robert. She declined to dismiss any of her ladies. Sir Robert persisted, and finally refused to form a Cabinet. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues were recalled. The power remained in the hands of the Whigs, and the explanations given by the two parties in Parliament added to the question an importance it had not at first deserved. Some years later, by the wise advice of Prince Albert, it was decided that the ladies of the royal household who were very closely connected with the members of a retiring administration should naturally share the fate of husbands or brothers, and resign their positions. But when the matter was thus settled once for all, the queen had already in her domestic life an intimate companion whom no political oscillation could remove from her.

The ministry remained feeble in both Houses, and was violently attacked. Lord Brougham reproached the ministers bitterly with their unconstitutional complaisance. "I thought," he exclaimed, "that we belonged to a country in which the government by the crown and the wisdom of Parliament was everything, and the personal feelings of the sovereign were absolutely not to be named at the same time. . . . I little thought to have lived to hear it said by the Whigs of 1839, 'Let us rally round the queen. Never mind the House of Commons; never mind measures; throw principles to the dogs; leave pledges unredeemed; but for God's sake rally round the throne.' Little did I think the day would come when I should hear such language, not from the unconstitutional, place-hunting, king-loving Tories, who thought the public was made for the king, and not the king for the public; not from the Whigs themselves. The Jamaica Bill, said to be a most important measure, had been brought forward. The government staked

their existence upon it. They were not able to carry it; they therefore conceived they had lost the confidence of the House of Commons. They thought it a measure of paramount necessity then. Is it less necessary now? Oh, but that is altered! The Jamaica question is to be new fashioned; principles are to be given up; and all because of two ladies of the bedchamber."

Parliamentary recriminations, whether well founded or not, and the weakness of the administration, were alike powerless to interfere with the magnificent outbursts of human thought and invention which signalled the first years of the young sovereign's reign. The change effected by the application of steam to the means of locomotion by sea and land was beginning to renew the face of the world, while no man could as yet measure its marvellous effects. Four railways were opened in England between 1837 and 1839. Navigation by steam was applied to the transatlantic voyage about the same time, and a line of steamships established between England and America. The first experiments with the electric telegraph date equally from this epoch of marvellous development of the human mind. Some time before this, the eminent mathematician, Joseph Marie Ampère, had discovered the principle and commenced the application of electricity to the transmission of news; but his experiments were still incomplete and theoretic when Professor Wheatstone and Mr. Cooke took out a patent "for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuits." Ariel had not yet set forth to "put a girdle round the earth in forty seconds," but his wings were already clearly to be discerned. The act ordering the transmission of the mails by railway wherever lines had been established, had scarcely been passed, in 1838, when an important reform was introduced which radically modified the post-office system in England, and

progressively throughout the entire world.

The transmission

of letters was expensive and difficult; for the support of the department it had been believed necessary to fix very high rates, Mr. Rowland Hill proposed to reduce the postage on letters to one penny, asserting that the immense development of letter-writing consequent upon this reduction would fill, and more than fill, the deficit arising from the reduction of the tax. He had commenced his campaign as early as 1837, and his doctrines by degrees gained proselytes. The tax levied upon letter-writing weighed most heavily upon the lower classes, who did not profit by the franking privileges afforded to members of Parliament. Miss Martineau relates how the passion of Mr. Hill for his favorite reform was excited by a little incident witnessed by one of his friends, the poet Coleridge:

"Coleridge, when a young man, was walking through the Lake district, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of sight, she showed Coleridge how his money had been wasted as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself, that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter; and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. Most persons would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell; but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It struck Mr. Hill that there must. be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare."

The excitement was great in the post-office department, and the resistance prolonged; but it is the honor and strength of free countries that new and fruitful ideas always find some brave mind and persevering will to defend and propagate them. Government was not convinced of the practical utility of Mr. Hill's proposition, ardently supported though it was in the Houses of Parliament; but it was agreed to reduce the postage to fourpence for each letter not exceeding a half-ounce in weight, throughout the whole extent of the United Kingdom.

A year later, in the month of January, 1840, the definitive reform was accomplished, and a uniform rate of a penny a letter was fixed, while the franking privileges accorded to members of Parliament and of the government were at the same time materially abridged. Free scope being thus offered to commercial and individual correspondence, its development has since surpassed all expectation; the number of letters rising from eighty-two millions in the year 1839 to more than a thousand millions in the year 1875, in Great Britain and Ireland. The entire world profits by the persevering initiative of Sir Rowland Hill. Time and space had begun to yield before the increasing energy of the human mind, and it was reserved for his administrative faculty to inflict upon them a new defeat by bringing the interchange of letters within the reach of all.

So much intellectual activity, so much material progress and increasing energy, naturally excite a people enjoying their beneficial effects. The abrupt change brought about in the social condition by the rapid extension of railways was of a nature to reveal, and did in fact bring to light, abysses of the rudest ignorance; it excited passions and hopes, old and yet forever new.

A half-insane leader, assuming a pretentious title, raised an insurrection in Kent, promising the peasants a regeneration in society, as once Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had done in the