One of the strongest recommendations of this measure, and a weighty reason also in favor of the immediate adoption of the whole system of cheap postage, is found in the present derangement of postal intercourse between Great Britain and the United States. These two great nations, the Anglo-Saxon Brotherhood, are at this moment “trying to see which can do the other most harm,” by a course of mutual retaliation, which may be known in future history as the _war of posts_. It is the opinion of some philosophers, that in wars in general, the party most to blame is the one which gives the heaviest blows; but in this case there arises a new problem, whether each particular blow does the most damage to the party which receives or to the one that gives it. The principal points in the contest I suppose to be these. The American government charges Great Britain five cents postage on all letters in the British packet mails, borne across our country at the expense of Great Britain, to and from the province of Canada. Great Britain in return, charges the United States the full rate of ship postage on all letters in the American packet mails, which touch at a British port on their way to and from the continent of Europe. Then the Postmaster-General of the United States suspends the agreement by which a mutual postage account is kept between his department and the post-office in Canada. And now a bill is before Congress, having actually passed the House of Representatives in one day, by which our own citizens are to pay 24 cents postage on every letter, and 4 cents on every newspaper, brought by the British mail steamers, as a tax to our own post-office, although the same postage has already been prepaid by the sender in England. The tax thus imposed on our own people, in the prosecution of this postal war, will amount to $178,586 a year, no small burden upon a subject of taxation so sensitive as postage, and no trifling obstruction to the intercourse between the two countries, and between the emigrants who find a refuge on our shores and the friends they have left behind. Such a stoppage is peculiarly to be regretted at this juncture, when the number of emigrants is so rapidly increasing, and all the interests of humanity seem to require the utmost freedom and facility of intercourse between the United States and the European world.