reforms. After the publication of a few numbers of the Anti-Corn-Law Circular, the government required that it should have a penny stamp; but the payment of this tax enabled it to be sent post-free. Were the League to its tracts and its letters to every village in the kingdom, in the work of enlightening its obscurest corners, it was desirable that there should be a cheap postage. Rich Cobden, and other free traders of Manchester, had earnestly forwarded, by their evidence and their labour, the scheme of an uniform penny postage, originated and most admirably worked out by Mr. Rowland Hill, Mr. Charles Knight, Mr. W. H. Ashurst, and others, in London. It triumphed over the opposition of the government officials; and even the experiment of a uniform fourpenny rate, to precede the wider postal reform, was greatly favourable to the operations of the League, now in close correspondence with the leading friends of free trade in every large town. When the penny postage rate came, the correspondence of the League increased a hundred fold. The railways were rapidly spreading their ramifications, and, ere the contest was over, gave a seeming ubiquity to some of the more active members of the League.
Manchester had again the opportunity of asserting its free-trade principles by an election. Mr. Poulett Thomson accepted the appointment to the Governor-Generalship of the British Provinces of North America. He had found it difficult to reconcile his duty to his constituents with the support required to be given to the general policy of his colleagues in the government. In an extract from his "Journal," written when he had been a few days at sea, given by his brother in the " Life of Lord Sydenham," he says:—"Saturday, September 21, 1839. I have thought a good deal, within the last few days, of my position; and, upon the whole, I think I have done right, both on public and personal grounds. I have a better chance of settling things in Canada than any one they could have found to
