In estimating the comparative cost of conveyance by road and by railway, not only are the Government officers, as I have shown you, wrong in their figures and calculations, but they suppress the great items which entailed expense on the public under the old mail coach system, and which are now saved to the State. Let me mention another saving. Under the old system, the Post Office packets were a source of well ascertained loss to the State. The old Holyhead mail coach could not bring down a sufficient number of passengers to pay the cost of the passage from Holyhead to Dublin. The packet service with Ireland entailed a loss of more than £100,000 a-year. At the present time, the railway saves the Government nearly all this loss. In consequence of the travelling facilities now afforded by the railway, the boats between Holyhead and Dublin contract to perform the service of the Government for a payment of £25,000 a-year.[153] And yet the department complains that it pays £30,000 a-year, for carrying its mails, to the railway company which has enabled it to effect this enormous annual saving. This example proves this part of the case. The Report omits to take into account the amount thus saved; or any similar savings, such as £25,000 a-year formerly paid for conveyance of mails by steam packets from London to Rotterdam and Hamburgh, now sent to Dover by the South-Eastern Railway. If I admit that which the Report does not establish, that £400,000 is paid to railway companies for postal service, at any rate I am entitled to have the public savings put against that amount. If I consider the vast total of those savings, I cannot doubt, for a moment, that railways are in reality not getting what they are fairly entitled to, for performing the duties for which the State formerly had to pay so largely. Considering the enormous item of turnpike tolls remitted to the old mail coaches,—the vast saving effected in the maintenance of the roads themselves,—the greatly increased facilities demanded by the new postal system,—the incalculable gain in consequence of the increased speed,—and the diminution of heavy loss upon steam packet and such like traffic, I should really be tempted to say, that if the Government paid to railways double what they paid to the proprietors of old stage coaches, they would still be gainers by the use of railways for the purposes of the Post Office. But when I consider, that according to the showing of this Report itself, they pay no more, if so much to railways, as they paid under the old system, whilst they carry five-and-a-half fold more letters, to say nothing of newspapers and parcels, I am surprised at the assertion that “The penny postage, without railways, would even have been more profitable than it now is.”