THE POSTAL SERVICE.

Southland Times, Issue 1007, 21 August 1868, Page 3

THE POSTAL SERVICE.

(Froin the "Nelson Examiner.") The Report on the Postal Service of New Zealand has just been printed and laid before Parliament, and, as usual, contains information that is both useful and instructive. We were desirous of seeing this report to ascertain how far the opinion expressed by us two years ago, of the serious effect a penny postage would have on the circulation of newspapers, had been verified, and we are sorry to find our forebodings have been more than borne out. For the year 1866, at the termination of which newspapers ceased to circulate through the post-offices free of charge, the total number despatched was 2,413,511 ; for the year 1867, when the postage tax. was in. operation, the number of newspapers despatched was 1,390,368, shewing a falling off to the enormous extent of 1,023,145 copies^ or more than tjro-fifths of the circulation of the preceding year, although the population of the colony had in the meantime increased. This is not a mere newspaper question. The diminution in circulation by post of more than a million copies of the newspapers published in New Zealand, means that readers to probably more than double that number who hitherto have been kept informed of what is doing in the colony, are cut off from obtaining that information. The newspaper sent monthly by mail, is, in thousands of instances, the only tie maintained between the settler who emigrated and the friends he left behind. If we reflect how newspapers so forwarded, pass from house to house, the interest they awaken and maintain in the colony, the immigration they induce, we shall obtain a faint notion of the mischief inflicted on New .Zealand by severing the ties which it was our interest in every way to cultivate and maintain. It may seem a small thing the payment of a penny for the transmission of a newspaper, but that it has cut down their circulation by post to more than a million copies a-year is indisputable. Had no such impost been levied, the circulation for the past year would doubtless have risen ; so that it is not only the diminished circulation the pennytax is chargeable with, but the otherwise increase. If we look at the return of newspapers received in the colony by post, we find further evidence of the evils the tax has indicted. When persons resident in the the colony give up sending papers to their friends residing in other parts of the world, these in return will no longer forward newspapers to New Zealand. The intercourse previously maintained ceases. In many cases the failure to forward a newspaper leads to a conclusion that the friend who had perhaps sent it for years, no longer lives, and all interests with respect to him and the colony ceases. That there should be a decrease of 289,000 papers received through the post for last years, is therefore quite natural. So many links of interest between ourselves and our parent country are thereby broken. So much political instruction as this quarter of a million of British Journals were calculated to impart to persons in New Zealand, is lost, for, be it remembered, the newspaper is the chief instructor of many thousands of our settlers.