A Hundred Years by Post Part 5

A clever instance of how the possession of early news could be turned to profitable account in the younger days of the century is recorded of Mr.

John Rennie, a nephew of his namesake the great engineer, and an extensive dealer in corn and cattle. His headquarters at the time were at East Linton, near Dunbar. "At one period of his career Mr. Rennie habitually visited London either for business or pleasure, or both combined. One day, when present at the grain market, in Mark Lane, sudden war news arrived, in consequence of which the price of wheat immediately bounded up 20s., 25s., and even 30s. per quarter. At once he saw his opportunity and left for Scotland by the next mail. He knew, of course, that the mail carried the startling war news to Edinburgh, but he trusted to his wit to outdo it by reaching the northern capital first. As the coach pa.s.sed the farm of Skateraw, some distance east of Dunbar, it was met by the farmer, old Harry Lee, on horseback. Rennie, who was an outside pa.s.senger, no sooner recognised Lee than he sprang from his seat on the coach to the ground. Coming up to Lee, Rennie hurriedly whispered something to him, and induced him to lend his horse to carry Rennie on to East Linton. Rennie, who was an astonis.h.i.+ngly active man, vaulted into the saddle, and immediately rode off at full gallop westwards. The day was a Wednesday, and, as it was already 11 o'clock forenoon, he knew that he had no time to lose; but he was not the stamp of man to allow the gra.s.s to grow under his feet on such an important occasion. Ere he reached Dunbar the mail was many hundred yards behind. At his own place at East Linton he drew up, mounted his favourite horse "Silvertail," which for speed and endurance had no rival in the county, and again proceeded at the gallop. When he reached the Gra.s.smarket, Edinburgh--a full hour before the mail,--the grain-selling was just starting, and before the alarming war news had got time to spread Rennie had every peck of wheat in the market bought up. He must have coined an enormous profit by this smart transaction; but to him it seemed to matter nothing at all. He was one of the most careless of the harum-scarum sons of Adam, and if he made money easily, so in a like manner did he let it slip his grip."

The two following instances of the expedients to which merchants resorted, before the introduction of the telegraph, in cases of urgency, and when the letter post would not serve them, are given by the author of _Glasgow Past and Present_, to whose work reference has already been made:--

"During the French War the premiums of insurance upon running s.h.i.+ps (s.h.i.+ps sailing without convoy) were very high, in consequence of which several of our Glasgow s.h.i.+p-owners who possessed quick-sailing vessels were in the practice of allowing the expected time of arrival of their s.h.i.+ps closely to approach before they effected insurance upon them, thus taking the chance of a quick pa.s.sage being made, and if the s.h.i.+ps arrived safe the insurance was saved.

"Mr. Archibald Campbell, about this time an extensive Glasgow merchant, had allowed one of his s.h.i.+ps to remain uninsured till within a short period of her expected arrival; at last, getting alarmed, he attempted to effect insurance in Glasgow, but found the premium demanded so high that he resolved to get his s.h.i.+p and cargo insured in London.

Accordingly, he wrote a letter to his broker in London, instructing him to get the requisite insurance made on the best terms possible, but, at all events, to get the said insurance effected. This letter was despatched through the post-office in the ordinary manner, the mail at that time leaving Glasgow at two o'clock p.m. At seven o'clock the same night Mr. Campbell received an express from Greenock announcing the safe arrival of his s.h.i.+p. Mr. Campbell, on receiving this intelligence, instantly despatched his head clerk in pursuit of the mail, directing him to proceed by postchaises-and-four with the utmost speed until he overtook it, and then to get into it; or, if he could not overtake it, he was directed to proceed to London, and to deliver a letter to the broker countermanding the instructions about insurance. The clerk, notwithstanding of extra payment to the postilions, and every exertion to accelerate his journey, was unable to overtake the mail; but he arrived in London on the third morning shortly after the mail, and immediately proceeded to the residence of the broker, whom he found preparing to take his breakfast, and before delivery of the London letters. The order for insurance written for was then countermanded, and the clerk had the pleasure of taking a comfortable breakfast with the broker. The expenses of this express amounted to 100; but it was said that the premium of insurance, if it had been effected, would have amounted to 1500, so that Mr. Campbell was reported to have saved 1400 by his prompt.i.tude."

"At the period in question a rise had taken place in the cotton-market, and there was a general expectancy among the cotton-dealers that there would be a continued and steady advance of prices in every description of cotton. Acting upon this belief Messrs. James Finlay & Co. had sent out orders by post to their agent in India to make extensive purchases of cotton on their account, to be s.h.i.+pped by the first vessels for England. It so happened, however, shortly after these orders had been despatched, that cotton fell in price, and a still greater fall was expected to take place. Under these circ.u.mstances Messrs. Finlay & Co.

despatched an overland express to India countermanding their orders to purchase cotton. This was the first, and, I believe, the only overland express despatched from Glasgow to India by a private party on commercial purposes."

One of the greatest achievements of our own time, yet too often overlooked, is the marvellously rapid diffusion of parliamentary news throughout the country. Important debates are frequently protracted in the House of Commons into the early hours of the morning. The speeches are instantly reported by the shorthand writers in the gallery, who dog the lips of the speakers and commit their every word to paper. Thus seized in the fleet lines of stenography, the words and phrases are then transcribed into long-hand. Relays of messengers carry the copy to the telegraph office, where the words are punched in the form of a mysterious language on slips of paper like tape, which are run through the Wheatstone telegraph transmitter, the electric current carrying the news to distant stations at the rate of several hundred words a minute.

At these stations the receiving-machine pours out at an equal rate, another tape, bearing a record in a different character, from which relays of clerks, attending the oracle, convert the weighty sayings again into ordinary language. The news thus received is carried forthwith by a succession of messengers to the newspaper office; the compositors set the matter up in type; it is reviewed and edited by the men appointed to the duty; the columns are stereotyped, and in that form are placed in the printing-machines. The machines are set in motion at astonis.h.i.+ng speed, turning out the newspapers cut and folded and ready for the reader. A staff is in attendance to place under cover the copies of subscribers for despatch by the early mails. These are carried to the post-office, and so transmitted to their destinations. Taking Edinburgh as a point for special consideration, all that has been stated applies to this city. For the first despatches to the north, the _Scotsman_ and _Leader_ newspapers are conveyed to certain trains as early as 4 A.M.; and by the breakfast-hour, or early in the forenoon, the parliamentary debates of the previous night are being discussed over the greater part of Scotland. And all this hurry and intellectual activity is going on while the nation at large is wrapped in sleep, and probably not one person in a hundred ever thinks or concerns himself to know how it is done.

The frequency and rapidity of communication between different parts of the world seems to have brought the whole globe into a very small focus, for obscure places, which would be unknown, one would think, beyond their own immediate neighbourhoods, are frequently well within the cognisance of persons living in far-distant quarters. An instance of this is given by the postmaster of Epworth, a village near to Doncaster.

"We have," says the postmaster, "an odd place in this parish known as Nineveh Farm. Some years ago a letter was received here which had been posted somewhere in the United States of America, and was addressed merely

Mr. ---- NINEVEH.

I have always regarded its delivery to the proper person as little less than a miracle, but it happened."

It is impossible to say how far the influence of this great revolution in the mail service on land and sea may extend. That the change has been, on the whole, to the advantage of mankind goes without saying. One contrast is here given, and the reader can draw his own conclusions in other directions. The peace of 1782, which followed the American War of Independence, was only arrived at after negotiations extending over more than two years. Prussia and Austria were at war in 1866. The campaign occupied seven days; and from the declaration of war to the formal conclusion of peace only seven weeks elapsed. Is it to be doubted that the difference in the two cases was, in large measure, due to the fact that news travelled slowly in the one case and fast in the other?

We may look back on the past with very mixed feelings,--dreaming of the easy-going methods of our forefathers, which gave them leisure for study and reflection, or esteeming their age as an age of lethargy, of lumbering and slumbering.

We are proud of our own era, as one full of life and activity, full of hurry and bustle, and as existing under the spell of high electrical tension. But too many of us know to our cost that this present whirl of daily life has one most serious drawback, summed up in the commonplace, but not the less true, saying,--

"It's the pace that kills."

Yet one more thought remains. Will the pace be kept up in the next hundred years? There is no reason to suppose it will not, and the world is hardly likely to go to sleep. Our successors who live a hundred years hence will doubtless learn much that man has not yet dreamt of. Time will produce many changes and reveal deep secrets; but as to what these shall be, let him prophesy who knows.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Note A in Appendix.

[2] See Note D in Appendix.

[3] See Note B in Appendix.

[4] See Note C in Appendix.

[5] Exclusive of franked letters.

[6] From the collection of the late Sir Henry Cole in the Edinburgh International Exhibition, 1890.

APPENDIX.

A.

As to the representation in Parliament, the freeholders in the whole of the Counties of Scotland, who had the power of returning the County Members, were, in 1823, for example, just under three thousand in number. These were mostly gentlemen of position living on their estates, with a sprinkling of professional men; the former being, from their want of business training, ill suited, one would suppose, for conducting the business of a nation. The Town Councils were self-elective--hotbeds of corruption; and the members of these Town Councils were intrusted with the power of returning the Members for the boroughs. The people at large were not directly represented, if in strictness represented at all.

B.

Francis, afterwards Lord Jeffrey, in a letter of the 20th September 1799, describes the discomfort of a journey by mail from Perth to Edinburgh, when the coach had broken down, and he was carried forward by the guard by special conveyance. His graphic description is as follows:--"I was roused carefully half an hour before four yesterday morning, and pa.s.sed two delightful hours in the kitchen waiting for the mail. There was an enormous fire, and a whole household of smoke. The waiter was snoring with great vehemency upon one of the dressers, and the deep regular intonation had a very solemn effect, I can a.s.sure you, in the obscurity of that Tartarean region, and the melancholy silence of the morning. An innumerable number of rats were trottin and gibberin in one end of the place, and the rain clattered freshly on the windows. The dawn heavily in clouds brought on the day, but not, alas! the mail; and it was long past five when the guard came galloping into the yard, upon a smoking horse, with all the wet bags lumbering beside him (like Scylla's water-dogs), roaring out that the coach was broken down somewhere near Dundee, and commanding another steed to be got ready for his transportation. The noise he made brought out the other two sleepy wretches that had been waiting like myself for places, and we at length persuaded the heroic champion to order a postchaise instead of a horse, into which we crammed ourselves all four, with a whole mountain of leather bags that clung about our legs like the entrails of a fat cow all the rest of the journey. At Kinross, as the morning was very fine, we prevailed with the guard to go on the outside to dry himself, and got on to the ferry about eleven, after encountering various perils and vexations, in the loss of horse-shoes and wheel-pins, and in a great gap in the road, over which we had to lead the horses, and haul the carriage separately. At this place we supplicated our agitator for leave to eat a little breakfast; but he would not stop an instant, and we were obliged to s.n.a.t.c.h up a roll or two apiece and gnaw the dry crusts during our pa.s.sage to keep soul and body together. We got in soon after one, and I have spent my time in eating, drinking, sleeping, and other recreations, down to the present hour."

On going north from Edinburgh, on the same tour apparently, Jeffrey had previous experience of the difficulties of travel, as described in a letter from Montrose, date 26th August 1799.

"We stopped," says he, "for two days at Perth, hoping for places in the mail, and then set forward on foot in despair. We have trudged it now for fifty miles, and came here this morning very weary, sweaty, and filthy. Our baggage, which was to have left Perth the same day that we did, has not yet made its appearance, and we have received the comfortable information that it is often a week before there is room in the mail to bring such a parcel forward."

Writing from Kendal, in 1841, Jeffrey refers to a journey he made fifty years before--that is, about 1791--when he slept a night in the town.

His description of the circ.u.mstances is as follows:--

"And an admirable dinner we have had in the Ancient King's Arms, with great oaken staircases, uneven floors, and very thin oak panels, plaster-filled outer walls, but capital new furniture, and the brightest gla.s.s, linen, spoons, and china you ever saw. It is the same house in which I once slept about fifty years ago, with the whole company of an ancient stage-coach, which bedded its pa.s.sengers on the way from Edinburgh to London, and called them up by the waiter at six o'clock in the morning to go five slow stages, and then have an hour to breakfast and wash. It is the only vestige I remember of those old ways, and I have not slept in the house since."

C.

The discomfort of a long voyage in a vessel of this cla.s.s is well set forth in the correspondence of Jeffrey. In 1813 he crossed to New York in search of a wife; and in describing the miseries of the situation on board, he gives a long list of his woes, the last being followed by this declaration: "I think I shall make a covenant with myself, that if I get back safe to my own place from this expedition, I shall never willingly go out of sight of land again in my life."

D.

A notable instance of an attempt to shut the door in the face of an able man is recorded in the Life of Sir James Simpson, who has made all the world his debtors through the discovery and application of chloroform for surgical operations. Plain Dr. Simpson was a candidate for a professors.h.i.+p in the University of Edinburgh, and had his supporters for the honour; but there was among the men with whom rested the selection a considerable party opposed to him, whose ground of opposition was that, on account of his parents being merely tradespeople, Dr. Simpson would be unable to maintain the dignity of the chair. To their eternal discredit, the persons referred to did not look to the quality and ring of the "gowd," but were guided by the superficial "guinea stamp." The spread of public opinion is gradually putting such distinctions, which have their root and being in privilege and selfishness, out of court.