There were already 668 British steamers afloat, though the penny steamboat did not as yet ply upon the river. Heavy goods travelled by the canals and navigable rivers, of which there were 4,000 in Great Britain; the hackney coach, with its pair of horses, lumbered slowly along the street; the cabriolet was the light vehicle for rapid conveyance, but it was not popular; the omnibus had only recently been introduced by Mr. Shillibeer; and there were no hansom cabs. There was a Twopenny Post in London, but no Penny Post as yet. There was no Book Post, no Parcel Post, no London Parcels Delivery Company. If you wanted to send a parcel to anywhere in the country, you confided it to the guard of the coach; if to a town address, there were street messengers and the ‘cads’ about the stage-coach stations; there were no telegraphs, no telephones, no commissionaires. [Illustration: GENERAL POSTMAN] Fifty years ago the great railways were all begun, but not one of them was completed. A map published in the _Athenæum_ of January 23, 1836, shows the state of the railways at that date. The line between Liverpool and Manchester was opened in September, 1830. In 1836 it was carrying 450,000 passengers in the year, and paying a dividend of 9 per cent. The line between Carlisle and Newcastle was very nearly completed; that between Leeds and Selby was opened in 1834; there were many short lines in the coal and mining districts, and little bits of the great lines were already completed. The London and Greenwich line was begun in 1834 and opened in 1837. There were in progress the London and Birmingham, the Birmingham, Stafford, and Warrington, the Great Western as far as Bath and Bristol, and the London and Southampton passing through Basingstoke. It is amazing to think that Portsmouth, the chief naval port and place of embarkation for troops, was left out altogether. There were also a great many lines projected, which afterwards settled down into the present great Trunk lines. As they were projected in 1836, instead of Great Northern, North-Western, and Great Eastern, we should have had one line passing through Saffron Walden, Cambridge, Peterborough, Lincoln, York, Appleby, and Carlisle, with another from London to Colchester, Ipswich, Norwich, and Yarmouth; there was also a projected continuation of the G.W.R. line from Bristol to Exeter, and three or four projected lines to Brighton and Dover. The writer of the article on the subject in the _Athenæum_ of that date (January 23, 1836) considers that when these lines are completed, letters and passengers will be conveyed from London to Liverpool in ten hours. ‘Little attention,’ he says, ‘has yet been given to calculate the effects which must result from the establishment throughout the kingdom of great lines of intercourse traversed at a speed of twenty miles an hour.’ Unfortunately he had no confidence in himself as a prophet, or we might have had some curious and interesting forecasts.