conveyance of
letters is by making the Government the sole authorized carrier of them,
and demanding a monopoly price. When this price is so moderate as it is
in this country under the uniform penny postage, scarcely if at all
exceeding what would be charged under the freest competition by any
private company, it can hardly be considered as taxation, but rather as
the profits of a business; whatever excess there is above the ordinary
profits of stock being a fair result of the saving of expense, caused by
having only one establishment and one set of arrangements for the whole
country, instead of many competing ones."--J. S. Mill, _Principles of
Political Economy_, London, 1871, vol. ii. p. 461.

[743] _Vide_ note 2, opposite.

[744] "Wherever the benefit to the individual can be even approximately
estimated there is a strong presumption in favour of levying the cost
incurred from him and converting the tax into a 'fee.'"--C. F. Bastable,
op. cit., p. 267.

"To be properly remunerative to the State, as to a private individual,
the price at which a commodity is sold must be sufficient to pay
interest on the capital invested in the business, that is to say, to pay
for the use of the property which must be used in producing the
commodity, as well as to pay the more immediate cost of its production
in wages and materials. There is no ground at all for the theory
sometimes put forward that the State should deliberately abstain from
making a profit from the working of an institution like the Post Office.
Taxpayers are indeed nearly all users of the Post Office, and users of
the Post Office are nearly all taxpayers, but there is nothing to show
that people are taxed in the same proportion as they use the Post
Office--the largest taxpayers are not necessarily the largest users of
the Post Office. Consequently it is not a matter of complete
indifference whether the State, which in this case means the taxpayers,
makes a profit on the business or not. The only question difficult to
decide is how much interest on the capital invested the State ought to
obtain, in order to make the business remunerative but not a source of
taxation. When the State has no monopoly, or only a monopoly secured by
driving out all competitors in fair commercial rivalry (if such a case
has ever occurred), it may charge what it can get for the commodity sold
without making the business a source of taxation. But when the State has
conferred on itself a m