The fear of Anglicanism may remind us that the leveling of religious barriers was in part brought about by the movement toward political union. And in generating this new sense of solidarity, whether in respect to religion or politics, better facilities for intercourse and communication were not without importance. It is difficult for us, living in an age when a man may breakfast in Philadelphia and dine the same day in Boston, to remember that Franklin was "about a fortnight" making the same distance in 1724. Yet a quarter of a century later, when the means of travel were not much more expeditious even if they were more certain, men journeyed continuously up and down the road that led from Boston to New York and Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia out into the back country and along the Shenandoah Valley. So much so, that the inhabitants of the little town of New Brunswick, says Peter Kalm, "get a considerable profit from the travellers who every hour pass through on the high road." Communication by correspondence, immensely facilitated after the establishment of the "General Post Office" by Parliament in 1710, served often to create cordial relations between men living in different colonies; men who perhaps had never seen each other, and who might have been, as the good John Adams sometimes was, disillusioned by personal contact. Newspapers, long since established in Philadelphia and Charleston, as well as in New York and Boston, regularly carrying the latest intelligence from every colony into every other, wore away provincial prejudice and strengthened intercolonial solidarity by revealing the common character of governmental organization and of political issues from Massachusetts to South Carolina. The assembly at Williamsburg or at Philadelphia, guarding local privileges against the encroachments of prerogative, was made aware that in fundamentals the conflict was American rather than merely provincial, and proclaimed its rights more stubbornly and with far greater confidence for knowing that assemblies in New York and Boston were enlisted in the common cause.