When we have, as we shall undoubtedly have, sooner or later, the Euphrates Valley Railway,[91] it will, in the first instance, be carried from the ancient Port of Seleucia, on the Mediterranean, to Ja’bar-Castle, on the Euphrates, below which point there is water communication by the Euphrates and Tigris to the Persian Gulf.[92] Kurrachee[93] will then be the port of call between Europe and India. At whatever time these eighty miles shall be constructed, and proper lines of steamers established in connection with them, there will be a gain of fully four, if not five days over the existing Red Sea Route. But will progress in shortening time between England and India stop at the construction of only eighty more miles of railway?[94] It would be out of reason to suppose that such will be the fact. It may therefore be taken for granted that continuation of the whole 800 miles of Euphrates Valley line will be accomplished somehow or other. Whenever that time comes,—and every day is accelerating its advent,—the gain will be at least two days, possibly even a little more on the homeward journey. Then, India—the India of England—will, at its nearest point, be under fourteen days from England. Then the postal communication between the two empires will not be as it is now, forty-eight times a year; it will not be the two and fifty, so long proposed, so long and so miserably resisted by Post Office narrow sight and want of appreciation of imperial grandeur and importance.[95] No! It requires no great foresight, or fore-reading of events to feel conviction that the service will be daily, and that despatch will succeed despatch on each of the working days of the year, as well from west to east, as from east to westward. Even now, the postal service of England with the east is the grandest combined land and ocean communication of the world.[96] No other maritime service approaches it. It is five times as great as that of the Cunard Company. It is more than double that of the two great routes of the Royal West India Mail Company. Notwithstanding that its ramifications extend thousands of miles, the component parts of it fit in so harmoniously, and work together in such complete and accurate accordance, the one with the other, that whether we take the outward journeys with their divergent fragments, or the homeward journeys, continuously aggregating and increasing as they approach completion—the mails arrive almost with the rarely failing fidelity of clockwork—punctuality the rule, absence of it the rare exception.