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 passed 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 passenger, 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 astonishingly
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 grass 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
Grassmarket, 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 ships
(ships sailing without convoy) were very high, in consequence of which
several of our Glasgow ship-owners who possessed quick-sailing vessels
were in the practice of allowing the expected time of arrival of their
ships closely to approach before they effected insurance upon them, thus
taking the chance of a quick passage being made, and if the ships
arrived safe the insurance was saved.
"Mr. Archibald Campbell, about this time an extensive Glasgow merchant,
had allowed one of his ships 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 ship 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 ship. 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 L100; but it was said
that the premium of insurance, if it had been effected, would have
amounted to L1500, so that Mr. Campbell was reported to have saved L1400
by his promptitude."
"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 shipped 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 circumstances 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
astonishing 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 passed 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 assure 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 snatch up a roll or two apiece and gnaw the dry crusts during our
passage 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 circumstances 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
glass, 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 passengers 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 class 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
professorship 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.
* * * * *
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty, at the
Edinburgh University Press.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Hundred Years by Post, by J. Wilson Hyde