After four years’ almost unremitting attention to the postal service, the new system began to tell, and the results were that the receipts soon yielded the salary of the postmaster, and considerably increased the revenue of the government. As he himself stated, it “yielded three times as much clear profit to the crown as the post-office of Ireland did.” As the modern postal system was based in part upon that of Charles II.’s time, much of it remains to this day; but the vast improvements made give to the original plan what can be better expressed in the language of the Emperor Augustus: “I found Rome all brick, and left it all marble.” Thus the postal department, then in a _debris_ state of chaotic confusion, presents at the present time an institution wherein order and system reign supreme. Franklin made every department pay. The carrying of newspapers was made a source of revenue: previous to his administration they had been carried free. He charged each subscriber who received a newspaper by mail nine pence a year for fifty miles, and eighteen pence a year for one hundred miles. Post-riders received orders to take all newspapers offered, instead of only those issued by a _postmaster_. Franklin himself being both postmaster and newspaper publisher, this action on his part was considered worthy the man and his position. The speed of the post-riders was accelerated by his energy, and their number increased to meet the public demand. In 1753 the delivery of letters by the penny post was first begun, and at the same time letters were regularly advertised. Letters from all the neighboring counties were sent to Philadelphia, and lay there until called for. Our readers can form some idea of the mode of travelling between cities, when we state that Franklin improved on the old system by starting a mail from Philadelphia, to run three times a week in summer, to New York and Boston, and once a week in winter. To get an answer from Boston a Philadelphian had been obliged to wait six weeks. Franklin reduced the time to three. The rates of postage were also materially reduced. The rate across the ocean was fixed at one shilling, and, strange as it may seem, it has not changed since, although one hundred years have elapsed. Most of the post-roads then were mere bridle-paths through forests. “Even,” says a writer, “between Amboy and Trenton, the very road along which Franklin the runaway apprentice had wearily trudged in the rain in 1723, had as late as 1775 a stake set up every two miles to keep the traveller from going astray.”