THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8219, 24 August 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 1906.

The Imperial Postmaster-General must have found it very difficult to resist'the logic of Mr Benniker Beaton's latest appeal for tbe establishment of penny postage between the Mother Country and the United States. Mr Heaton summarised the arguments in a letter to the Daily News last month. "We and the people of the great Republic," he wrote, "boast a common origin, speak the same language, and cherish identical ideals. We are fast friends, and good customers to each other. Every year we send a quarter of a million young, healthy, industrious mechanics and labourers —''desirables' to a snan—-to cultivate the Western prairies; every year these wanderers remit some

£1,55 0,000 to mend the oheer o poor relatives in the Old Country. Such a remittance by a humble emigrant touches us beyond any other evidence tha* we oaq adduce." as many British immigrants, aooording to Mr Heaton, go to the United States as to the colonies, and ten millions out uf fifteen millions of emigrants went there during the'*pasfc century. Public opinion on both sides of the ocean, he urged, was strongly in favour of the reform which, by the multiplication of correspondence, would pay its own modest expenses. The American Post Office had shown by its vote at Kome, and in official reports, that it thought the penny rate both beneficial and profitable. Mr Heaton added that Anglo-Ameri-can trade reaohed the stupendous annual total of £139,000,000, and the heavy postage was, in effect, a tax on every penny of this before it was earned. "One fact settles the question," he continued. "Although letters to the United States cost 2}4d each, four million letters per annum are sent with them, in the same bags, through New York, and hundreds of miles farther into Canada, for one penny eaoh." Penny postage rules, it seems, all over North America, which is as wide in its way as [the Atlantic. A penny carries a letter all the 14,090 miles from London to New Zealand, and actually our penny letters are oarried over the Atlantic to New York and right aoroon the American continent, while the letter which stops short at New York is obarged 2>£d. It appears now that the opposition tu the reduction comes chiefly from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but th«j Post Offioe authorities estimate that the correspondence would increase by 150 per cent, in two years if the reduction were made.