It is clear there must be some serious error in the Post Office figures, and that error is of such a character as really to invalidate all the calculations of the Report. Either £155,000 could not have represented the cost of carrying the mails formerly, or £108,000 a year, instead of £43,000 a year, must be deducted, for the side mails, from the total sum of £443,000, assumed to be the cost of postal conveyance at the present time. But, it is also to be remarked, that the payments to mail coach proprietors for working, did not represent anything like the amount borne by the public for the mails. The Post Office treats this question as if the working at 2¼d. a mile is all the expense the public have to bear. They forget the tolls. They forget that a mail coach could not pass over a road without wear and tear, and that the Post Office paid nothing for that wear and tear. The public in another shape bore that expenditure. Under the old system, indeed, as the Postmaster-General’s table shows, many of the old coaches were only too glad to “carry a bag” (as it was termed), merely for the sake of obtaining exemption from toll, which cost on the average 5_d._ per mile to the coach proprietor. You must remember that this toll was levied on the public using the turnpike road, for those purposes of repair, which are now defrayed by railway companies, in the shape of reparation of permanent way. The wear and tear of a railway line is solely paid for by the railway company, who can receive nothing in the shape of an equivalent for remission of tolls, except by direct payment. The Post Office forgets, again, that under the old system, the roads, to some extent, were made at the cost of the public. Nearly a million of money was expended by Government in making and improving the old Holyhead line of road. Why was this expenditure incurred? It was incurred to save six hours in the delivery of the mails between Dublin and London. This, be it recollected, was the measure of the value of time by the State. They spent a million of treasure to save six hours of time. Contrast the time occupied in the transmission of mails now and in the year after that expenditure was incurred? The Holyhead mail, after a million of public money had been spent in expediting it, still took 26 hours on the road. The same mail by railway only occupies 8½ hours[152] on its whole journey. Nearly 18 hours have been thus saved on this one line of road; and yet though the Government could spend a million to save 6 hours, they complain of paying £30,000 a-year, or only the interest at 5 per cent. upon £600,000, for a railway service passing over a line of road which they did not expend a farthing to construct, and which is kept in repair by private individuals, who have incurred the enormous expense of spanning the Menai Straits by a railway bridge.