The Contract-Office is charged with the conduct of mail-lettings, and all contracts and allowances for inland mail transportation, with the mail messenger service; the supervision and regulation of mail-contractors, and the routes of mail-transit, including distributing-offices; and with the increase and diminution of service on mail-routes. _FINANCE-OFFICE._ To this office are assigned the issuing of postage-stamps and stamped envelopes for the prepayment of postage and the accounts thereof; the preparation of warrants and drafts in payment of balances reported by the Auditor to be due to mail-contractors and other persons; and the superintendence of the rendition by postmasters of their quarterly returns of postages. It embraces, also, all the operations of the dead-letter office, and the accounts connected therewith. _INSPECTION-OFFICE._ The Inspection-Office is charged with the observation of failures and delinquencies in the service of contractors and route-agents; with fines and remissions thereof; with the subject of mail-depredations, and prosecution of violators of postal laws; with the duty of procuring and distributing mail-bags, locks and keys, and some other duties of detail. Perhaps no institution in this or any other country requires more enterprise, general knowledge of business, and geography, than does that of the post-office. We have already alluded to the fact of its being considered by many as a “mere workshop” of the general department, and whose operations are simply mechanical; but our readers ere this have been undeceived as regards such a construction, and it must loom up before them a prominent intellectual branch of our government. That England has a high estimate of her post-office department is evident from the encouragement given to every one connected with it, and sustaining alike its literary character in historic publications. We make the following extract from a recent work entitled “Her Majesty’s Mails”:— “There is no postal service in the world so well managed as that of Great Britain. It is now not merely a self-supporting but a productive institution; whereas there was a deficiency of half a million in the post-office of America before the rupture between North and South. Though America for ninety years has been, next to England, the most commercial country in the world, yet, compared with the population, five times as many letters pass through the English post as through the American. London and its suburbs alone, with its less than three millions of inhabitants, sends forth a greater number of letters than the whole of America. “The next best-managed post-office to our own is that of France; but in France, by the law of 1856, there are five different tariffs of postages. Judged by the revenue produced, the English post-office, notwithstanding its low rate of charges, stands first.