Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian, financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit. West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in 1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one--the _Pittsburg Gazette_--existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871, with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875), with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and 622--an advance of sixfold.