This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative, whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own past. The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its descendants lording the ocean under another flag. The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within the past two generations for the mail communication of the two continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the time. Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe Égalité had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage, too--more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal "from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut, dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage down the Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time is less now to Japan, and about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service--far cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of the present Constitution between our own cities. Our foreign service with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution undreamed of in that day--the money-order system. Under this admirable contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security than the regular banks formerly attained.