This very absence of traditions and of vigorous commercial life made the place more suitable for a Post-Office station, and may have largely influenced its choice. It would not have served the Department nearly so well to send its officers to a port where their affairs must have taken rank among other transactions, and the despatch of mails might have been delayed by the pressure of urgent commercial business. At Falmouth My Lords the Postmaster General[1] took what was practically a clear board, and could write on it what they pleased. Footnote 1: The office of Postmaster General was until the year 1823 always held jointly by two Ministers of the Crown. Throughout the eighteenth century the links which bound the Post-Office Service to the town grew steadily stronger. As the numbers of the Packets increased the local tradesmen prospered; the demand for naval stores was incessant; and in those days of difficult and slow communication it was necessary to obtain almost all supplies locally. Shipbuilding yards sprang up, rope walks were laid out, inns were built for the accommodation of the travellers who came from all parts of England to take passage for Spain or the West Indies. A considerable number of merchants found their chief occupation in supplying the officers of the Packets with goods to be sold on commission in foreign ports, for the statute which prohibited such trade was not enforced, and many more were engaged in disposing of wines and lace, tobacco and brandy, which were smuggled home on board the Post-Office vessels under cover of the opportunities created by this irregular traffic. The sons of the sailors, as they grew up, sailed with their fathers. The sons of the commanders took up their fathers’ appointments, while the old men retired on their pensions and their savings to comfortable houses in the pleasant neighbourhood of Falmouth, creating with their wives and families a society among themselves, and so binding closer with each successive generation the ties between the town and the Service in which their lives were spent. And so as the town of Falmouth grew and developed it continued to be what it had been at the outset, a Packet town, every trade and interest which its inhabitants professed being drawn irresistibly towards the important State Department which had settled itself down in their midst. Merchants and tradesmen were to be found of course, who conducted prosperous businesses upon independent lines; but it is probably safe to say that at the end of the last century there was hardly one person in the place who did not feel that he would have been injured in his profession, and yet more in his sympathies and his pride, by any step which impaired the permanence of the relation between Falmouth and the Post-Office Service.