The petition of the Undersigned sheweth most respectfully unto your Honorable body, that, in his opinion, the present postage law of this free republic is a grievance, and in particular in that section which requires three cents to be pre-paid on every single newspaper not mailed from the publishing office. By the present law a single letter can be sent three hundred miles for five cents, while it costs three cents to send a newspaper to the nearest Post Office, if it be not ^even^ one mile. It costs more to transmit a newspaper over one mile of this democratic country, than it does to carry a letter across the whole length of monarchial England! These things ought not so to be. Republican America ought surely to keep pace with the “Spirit of the age.” While your petitioner has been gratified to witness the deep interest which the public press has taken, within a few years past, on the subject of a cheap and uniform postage law, he has been not a little astineshed that those useful and inteligent gentlemen who conduct it, and thereby control the public opinion, have never, so far as he has seen, written a line of complaint against this three Cent postage tax. But it occurs to your humble petitioner that this disproportionate tax upon miscellaneous newspapers tends to create a newspaper monopoly and at the same time to restrain the diffusion of inteligence and knowledge, For example, the poor man, who takes but a single newspaper, when he has read it, wishes to re-mail it to a distant son, brother, cousin or friend, who may be poorer than himself, to have his far-off friend learn and enjoy what he has learned and enjoyed, and he would often do so were it not for the oppressive Three cent Law. Even you humble petioner, when he has read the interesting message of the President, or an eloquent speech of some honorable member of your honorable body, in the only newspaper which he is able to take and pay for, has often longed to send the same by mail to some poor relative, but who does not take the newspapers, but has been prevented by the burdensome postage law, as it now exists.

Your petitioner therefore prays your Honorable body to repeal or so to modify said law that the evil complained of may be remidied as entirely removed and thus will ever pray,