I have no doubt that the cheap transmission of letters, out of the mails, is now becoming systematized and extended between our large cities, and an immense amount of correspondence is also carried on between the large cities and the towns around. The Boston Path-Finder contains a list of 240 “Expresses,” as they are called, that is, of common carriers, who go regularly from Boston to other towns, distant from three miles to three hundred. Most of these men carry “mailable matter” to a great extent, in their pockets or hats, in the shape of orders, memorandums, receipts, or notes, sometimes on slips of paper, sometimes in letters folded in brown paper and tied with a string, and not unfrequently in the form of regularly sealed letters. If we suppose each one to carry, on an average, ten in a day, a very low estimate, there are 750,000 letters brought to Boston in a year by this channel alone. Everything which calls public attention to the subject of postage, every increase of business causing an increase of correspondence between any two places, every newspaper paragraph describing the wonderful increase of letters in England, will awaken new desires for cheap postage; and these desires will gratify themselves irregularly, unless the only sure remedy is seasonably applied. In the division of labor and the multiplication of competitions, there are many lines of business of which the whole profits are made up of extremely minute savings. In these the cost of postage becomes material; and such concerns will not pay five cents on their letters, when they can get them taken, carried and delivered for two cents. The causes which created illicit penny posts in England are largely at work here, with the growth and systematization of manufactures and trade; and they are producing, and will produce the same results, until, on the best routes, not one-sixth of the letters will be carried in the mail, unless the true system shall be seasonably established. The evils of such a state of things need not be here set forth. One of the greatest, which would not strike every mind, is the demoralization of the public mind, in abating the reverence for law, and the sense of gratitude and honor to the government. In this respect, of bringing all the correspondence into the mails, in furnishing all the facilities and encouragements to correspondence which the duty of the government requires, in superseding the use of unlawful conveyances, and in winning the patriotic regards of the people to the post-office, as to every man’s friend, the act of 1845 has entirely failed. It has not only falsified the predictions of us all in regard to its productiveness, on the one hand, but it has even convinced the highest official authority that it has failed to prove itself to be _the_ CHEAP POSTAGE, which the country needs and will support. In his last annual report, the Postmaster-General says: