On Friday night (May 16), the mail from the Euston Square Station consisted of one Post Office van and six very large tenders, containing large sacks of letters, newspapers and parcels (many of them as large as sacks of corn). The vans each measured 660 cubic feet; if we say 600, we shall have a total cubic contents of 4,000 feet. This is equal to the displacement of a vessel of more than 1,000 tons burden. I said, in my Address, that it would take fourteen or fifteen mail coaches to carry the Friday night’s mail from London to Birmingham: that every coach that ran in 1830 between London and Birmingham would now have been needed for Post Office purposes, if the London and North-Western Railway had not been brought into existence. It turns out that I was much under the mark. 4,000 cubic feet, the extent of accommodation required to be provided by the railway company, could not have been afforded by less than fifty of the old mails, even allowing that the two passenger-seats on the roof were devoted to the Post Office service, and the bags were packed to the height of 3 feet above the roof. And yet the Report tells us, that this extent of accommodation could have been afforded by the mail coaches that formerly ran on the North road; thus assuming for each old mail the same capacity as half an ordinary fly canal boat, or as two of our largest London omnibuses. 2nd. I proceed to the next question—the question of Expenditure. The Report states, that Mr. Hill’s plan would have been even more profitable under the old coach system than it now is. “Supposing,” says the Report, “that the number of mail coaches, all over the kingdom, had been doubled, the expenditure of the department for mail coach service would, in that case, have been advanced from £155,000 to only £310,000 per annum, whilst 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.” Now, I beg you to mark these figures. £155,000, says the Report, was the sum paid for the entire old mail coach service, whilst £443,000 is the sum now paid for railway and mail coach service, of which £400,000 is paid to railways alone, leaving £43,000 as the charge incurred by the side mails. Now, at page 14 of the Report, you will find it stated, that the branch mail coaches at the present time convey the mails over 31,667 miles per day at an average charge of 2¼d. per mile. 31,667 miles at 2¼d. per mile gives a total of £108,000 a year. Here is a total then of £108,000 a year paid at the present time merely for the conveyance of the side mails by coaches, in place of £43,000 as the Report leaves us to infer.[151] Now, if £108,000 a year is paid, at the present time, only for the conveyance, by two horse coaches and mail carts, of the side mails where railways do not run, how is it possible that the total cost of all the mail coach transit of England could have been only £155,000 a year?