Let us suppose that, partly to meet the increase of weight, either daily or on the heavy newspaper night only, and partly to provide for the establishment of additional day mails (they were already in existence on some of the lines), the number of mail coaches would have been doubled all over the kingdom, and that their cost would also have been doubled (an improbable supposition, considering the increase in the number of passenger coaches which must, in the absence of railways, have necessarily taken place to meet the increase of traffic). The expenditure of the department for mail-coach service would in that case have been advanced from £155,000[147] to only £310,000 per annum, while the present expenditure for the railway and mail coach service of the department is £443,000, of which sum £400,000 is paid to railway companies alone. Not only, therefore, would penny postage without railways have been both practicable and remunerative, but it would have been even more profitable (assuming the existing increase of letters) than it now is. In order to show the impracticability of carrying out the penny postage system without the use of railways, Mr. Stephenson states, while speaking of the mails now carried by the London and North-Western Railway, that “not one mail coach alone, but fourteen or fifteen mails would have been needed to carry on with regularity the Post Office traffic.” It is probable that Mr. Stephenson is not very far wrong in this assumption, although he deduces from it the erroneous conclusion that penny postage must have entailed a certain loss. The facts of the case are, that in 1838 twelve or thirteen mail coaches from London were actually employed to carry the mails which now leave London by the London and North-Western Railway; so that, on Mr. Stephenson’s own estimate, only two or three additional mail coaches would have been required for forwarding those mails, which, it may be observed, constitute about one-half of the whole of the night mail leaving London. The mail coaches which formerly carried the mails now leaving London in a concentrated form by the London and North-Western night mail train, were as follows, viz.:— London and Edinbro’ Night Mail. London and Leeds ” London and Halifax ” London and Holyhead ” London and Liverpool ” London and Manchester ” London and Glasgow ” London and Carlisle ” London and Derby ” London and Birmingham ” London and Birmingham } ” (Dublin Express) } London and Hull }[148] ” London and Worcester }