one is the cost of conveying the telegram to its destination; the other is the average price which can be expected to be paid by the public for such telegram. The cost of conveying the average message of 1886 will, as already stated, be 8¾d. This, we understand, may be lowered in subsequent years, by the still greater shortening of messages, to 8d. But this is the limit of reduction believed to be possible. Now, what will be the average price paid? Mr Shaw Lefevre tells us that, under our present system of charge, which encourages people to an unnecessary prolixity, the average number of words in the text of a telegram is seventeen. Is it not certain that this average, being largely made up of words which would never be sent but for the idea that people have of obtaining their money's full worth, and which would indubitably not be sent the moment they had to be paid for, will be greatly reduced – probably to ten or eleven? Mr Shaw Lefevre also tells us that the addresses may be expected in future to average five words only. This would make the average of the future telegram fifteen to sixteen words, all told, yielding 7½d. or 8d. In other words, the expenditure would be greater than the revenue.
That this estimate is by no means unfounded, is proved by the cases already cited, of France, Germany, and Switzerland. If, on the Continent, the average length of the telegram has fallen to fourteen words, we are surely within the mark in estimating that it may fall to fifteen or sixteen here. Indeed it is quite within the bounds of possibility that, although a certain number of much longer messages than are sent on the Continent will continue to be sent in this country, the overwhelming increase in the number of sixpenny telegrams may drag down the average to as low a point as that which Continental countries experience. If this were so – if 30 millions of telegrams were sent at an average cost to the nation of 8d., and an average cost to the senders of 7d. – there would be an annual deficit of £125,000, which, added to the present net revenue, which would then be lost, represents an annual loss to the country of nearly half a million sterling!
It must be remembered always that when the Government speak of the cost of sending a telegram, no interest on the telegraph capital, as many innocently imagine, is included in that cost. It is the net revenue of the telegraph department which goes to the payment of interest, and this net revenue has never been sufficient entirely to cover the interest. So that not only will the taxpayer have to pay this interest in the future, but he will also have to pay an additional sum in order that the sender of telegrams may have the advantage of telegraphing at an unduly cheap rate.
There has been much said on the subject of free addresses. As has been already intimated in these pages, we are the only people who allow addresses to go free; and whatever reasons may have weighed with those who originally instituted this freedom, no one who examines the question carefully can fail to see that, though such freedom might be possible under a system by which the minimum price paid secured a balance over and above the cost of conveyance, its raison d'être vanishes when once the principle of a word-tariff – that everything sent over the wires, and that only, is paid for – is accepted. To retain freedom of address with the
