[Mr. Stephenson having reviewed the complaints made by the Post Office about irregularities in 1856, and previously, and stated facts to show their injustice, and that they were fully as much attributable to the department as to the companies, proceeded with his address as follows.] If the Post Office authorities want the highest rates of speed, with perfect observance of time, they have an easy mode of securing it. Let them contract with the railway company for special trains, exclusively for the purposes of the mails. The companies will be only too glad to provide those trains, at the same, or even a less rate, than that at which they provide special trains for the public. They will, no doubt, enter into any arrangement for the arrival of such trains at their respective destinations, at the hour agreed upon. On the side of the Post Office, all that is requisite to secure this, is an equitable payment for the service, which, considering the great importance of the subject, ought not to be grudged to secure a rapid and punctual delivery of letters. We are told, indeed, in the Post Office Report, that the railways have no right to be treated on such principles. On the contrary, they are threatened. “The law officers of the Crown,” says that document, “have given an opinion that Government can claim exemption from toll on railways.” Happily, it is one thing for “the law officers of the Crown to give an opinion,” and another for a Government department to succeed in enforcing it. But who are these, asks the Report, who complain of “illiberal treatment?” The old mail coaches, it says, represented free trade and competition; but these railways are “large monopolies in the hands of a few private companies.” A few private companies! What is meant by a “private company”? The railway share and debenture holders of England number more than a quarter of a million. Do these capitalists represent a “private company”? An old mail coach, carrying four insides and three out, and horsed by Mr. Fagg at 2½d. a mile, is called in this Report a public conveyance, “by which the Post Office was protected from undue demands, in the transmission of its mails along the public highways of the United Kingdom,” whilst a railway, like the London and North-Western, with nearly eighteen thousand shareholders and a capital exceeding thirty millions, is called “a monopoly in the hands of a private company.” A monopoly! Allow me to ask, again, of what has any railway got a monopoly? The old “public highways,” as the Report calls them, are still open to everybody. The Post Office authorities may put upon them, once more, if they think fit, their favourite public conveyances. Except the bulk of their bags, there is nothing to prevent them from loading them once more in the court-yard of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and starting them off for Holyhead, or Aberdeen, with the old guard on his seat behind, and the old driver flourishing his whip.