One of the great advantages of railways in connection with the postal service is the greatly increased frequency of communication which they provide between all the large towns. Thus Liverpool has now six deliveries of Manchester letters daily; while every large town in the kingdom has two or more deliveries of London letters daily. In 1863, 393 towns had two mails daily from London; 50 had three mails daily; 7 had four mails a day _from_ London, and 15 had four mails a day _to_ London; while 3 towns had five mails a day _from_ London, and 6 had five mails a day _to_ London. Another feature of the railway mail train, as of the passenger train, is its capacity to carry any quantity of letters and post parcels that may require to be carried. In 1838, the aggregate weight of all the evening mails despatched from London by twenty-eight mail coaches was 4 tons 6 cwt., or an average of about 3¼ cwt. each, though the maximum contract weight was 15 cwt. The mails now are necessarily much heavier, the number of letters and packets having, as we have seen, increased more than ten-fold since 1839. But it is not the ordinary so much as the extraordinary mails that are of considerable weight,—more particularly the American, the Continental, and the Australian mails. It is no unusual thing, we are informed, for the last-mentioned mail to weigh as much as 40 tons. How many of the old mail coaches it would take to carry such a mail the 79 miles journey to Southampton, with a relay of four horses every five or seven miles, is a problem for the arithmetician to solve. But even supposing each coach to be loaded to the maximum weight of 15 cwt. per coach, it would require about sixty vehicles and about 1700 horses to carry the 40 tons, besides the coachman and guards. Whatever may be said of the financial management of railways, there can be no doubt as to the great benefits conferred by them on the public wherever made. Even those railways which have exhibited the most “frightful examples” of financing and jobbing, have been found to prove of unquestionable public convenience and utility. And notwithstanding all the faults and imperfections that have been alleged against railways, we think that they must, nevertheless, be recognised as by far the most valuable means of communication between men and nations that has yet been given to the world.