As bearing strongly upon this comparison of facilities, I may mention the somewhat remarkable fact, that copies of the very Report of the Committee of Consultation of the London and North-Western Railway, in which the Post Office is represented as unduly competing with railway companies for the carriage of books and parcels, were extensively circulated to that company’s shareholders through the medium of the Book Post, not merely to towns and villages at a distance from their railway, but even to Liverpool to which the company’s own trains might have carried them without any charge whatever. When it is recollected that there are about 10,500 Post Offices scattered throughout the United Kingdom, that there is scarcely a village without a Post Office, and scarcely even a hamlet without a regularly-established official means of communication with a Post Office, and that consequently persons even in the most secluded districts, can communicate by post with all parts of the kingdom with tolerable certainty, and with very little trouble or expense, it will readily be seen that such facilities as these must lead to the transmission of books and documents which otherwise would never be sent. In fact, the book post service is one so different in its character and objects from that to which the parcel arrangements of the railway companies are adapted, that it may fairly be assumed it would hardly exist at all, but for the extensive facilities for its development which the Post Office possesses. The evidence given before the Select Committee on Conveyance of Mails by Railways (1854), especially that of Mr. Charles Knight, the eminent publisher, is very decided on this point. He says (3872) that the cases in which books are sent by post may be nearly all considered as exceptional cases to the ordinary commercial operations of publishing; and again (3870 and 3892) that the book post may be looked upon as a mere auxiliary to the conveyance of parcels by other means; and (3860) that if the existing regulations were stopped, the public would not be able to derive the same advantages through any other channel. The Select Committee, in their Report, admitted their conviction that “a large proportion of the parcels would not be sent but for the facilities offered by the Post Office in their distribution.”