CHAPTER XIV
AS A POSTAL REFORMER (continued)
"The Post Office Annual Report gives one great food for thought, for it shows that every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom gets on an average 120 Postal Packets every year. That is 45,000,000 people get 5,400,000,000,000. Another interesting fact is that in 1840 the average number of letters received by the people of this country was 7, and in 1912 the average number of letters received by each individual is 70, or ten times more. I do not think the population is more than double that of 1840."
If I give way to Henniker Heaton on a single point he is on my doorstep the next morning with fifty more," said Mr Asquith, summing up in that one sentence the secret of H. H.'s successful warfare.
H. H. could afford to give his genial laugh when acquaintances spoke of him as a "lucky man"—a phrase chiefly employed by those who sleep while others wake, who rest while others toil.
"Keep on pegging away and you will win," wrote the Duke of Argyll, who knew something of H. H.'s persistent methods of attack.
"Be a Paganini—play on one string," was H. H.'s advice to ambitious young men entering Parliament, and he certainly lived up to his teaching. Year after year, he fiddled away on his one string outside the portals of St Martin's-le-Grand, regardless of all requests to move on. Postmasters came and Postmasters went, and still that one string called Reform sounded through the halls by day, and disturbed dreams by night. Postal officials suffering under
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