My object in this Report is to direct your attention to the facts on which, in my opinion, the Post Office is entitled to rely in opposition to the above allegations, the last of which has likewise been recently adopted in the Report of the Committee of Consultation of the London and North-Western Railway. It may perhaps be the desire of the Postmaster-General to furnish, in his Report for the current year, some corrections of these misconceptions, the more especially as Mr. Stephenson states, in the very outset of his address, that his chief object is to suggest topics for communications and discussion at future meetings over which he may have to preside. Such a correction is the more necessary, because there is reason to apprehend that these and other similar opinions which have been at various times promulgated have, by being made the ground for claiming special additional payment for the mail service, affected to a certain extent the arbitrations between the Post Office and railway companies, and have thus acquired practical importance. On the first point (taking the subjects in the order in which they are named above), it is hardly to be wondered at that the public generally should be led to form erroneous impressions, seeing how imperfectly the details of the Post Office are usually understood. But it will not be difficult to prove that the conclusion arrived at by Mr. Stephenson cannot be supported, and to show that the increase which has taken place in the weight of the mails would have presented no difficulty to their conveyance by mail coaches, and that since the transfer of the mails from coaches to railways, the cost of transmission has increased in a _far greater degree_ than it would probably have done had railways never been constructed. I should premise that it has been ascertained from returns kept by the department, that while the whole number of chargeable letters delivered in the United Kingdom has increased about six-fold, the increase has been about nine-fold with respect to letters to and from London; and the same remark applies, although the increase is in a somewhat different ratio, to newspaper and book parcels. If, therefore, it can be shown that the weight of mails at present despatched from London (which greatly exceeds that of mails brought to London) could have been carried by mail coaches, it follows that no difficulty would have arisen with the mails in other parts of the country, where the increase of weight has not been so large.