Question

Read the passage and answer the question. The first modern postal systems did not begin with letters at all. In seventeenth-century London, merchants began hiring messengers to carry urgent commercial notes between the docks and the counting houses, and coffee houses soon became informal sorting offices where captains, insurers and brokers exchanged news. Governments noticed the money moving through this traffic and, unwilling to leave it untaxed, claimed the mail as a state monopoly. Rowland Hill's penny post of 1840 then turned the logic upside down: instead of charging the receiver according to distance, the sender paid a flat, low rate in advance, and the volume of letters exploded. The pattern repeats everywhere the mail took hold - a private convenience, a state takeover, and finally a reform that made the service cheap enough for ordinary people. The internet is now rehearsing the same drama with electronic messages, and the lesson of the penny post is worth remembering: when the cost of sending a message collapses, the number of messages does not merely grow, it transforms who gets to speak. What was the earliest function of the messenger services described in the passage?