The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 1913. UNIVERSAL PENNY POST.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 48, 2 July 1913, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 1913. UNIVERSAL PENNY POST.

■Sir .John Hennikcr-Heaton, who did so much towards securing a penny post throughout the British Empire, now declares that tlie hour has struck lor the grand yet simple assertion of the brotherhood of nations through the medium of a universal penny postage. He points out that to-day franco has penny postage, Germany lias penny postage, Belgium has penny postage, Switzerland lias penny postage. China and Japan have penny postage, not only within their own I boundaries, hut also between eaeli other, as have also Austria and Germany. There now remains only the linking up of one country with the other. Referring to the glaring anomalies which still exist, Sir John says that the greatest farce of all is that twenty million letters from England to India and the East, Australia, etc., go through France <vid Italy every year each hearing penny stamps, yet it i.s twopenee-halfpenny for a letter from Dover to Calais. Another curious tiling is that Germany] has penny postage wiill the United ! Slates of America, and recently a German steamship took a hundred

thousand lei tors from New York to Hamburg at a penny each, calling on 1 the way at Southampton to take on' hoard a few letters from England, and Germany at twopenee-lialfpennyi each. To-day the number of letters; that on abroad from Britain amounts! to 200,000.()()() a year. Exactly one-j half he:ir penny stamps: the oilier j 100,000,000 hear twopenny-halfpennyj stamps. Sir John estimates that in three years universal penny postage, will pay—that is, that tin- increase of loiters in the Continent will have cone tip more that one and a half times—in oilier words, three letters will he sent in place of one. I here are forty-five million people in the I nited Kingdom and about forty million in France. Penny or ten centimes postage exists throughout, the British and French Empires, with a total of nearly live hundred million of population. Vet at this time the postage is one penny to Fiji, 11,000 miles from London and the postage to the Society Islands, 10,500 miles from Paris, is ten centimes, or one penny; and it j, s twopenee-lialfpenny, or twenty-live centimes, between Dover and Calais t wen tv-one miles.