But before going farther, let us premise that the late Mr. Robert Stephenson, in the course of the inaugural address which, as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he delivered on the 8th of January, 1856, made the following observations upon the connection between the Post Office and the railways:— “The facilities afforded by railways to the Post Office are, no doubt, of the highest public consequence. The speed which is attained in the transmission would appear, at first, to be the greatest item in the catalogue of those facilities; but it may be doubted if it is the most important. What is really of the greatest value to the Post Office, is the facility afforded for conveying bulk. It is not too much to say that without railway facilities, the excellent plans of Mr. Rowland Hill, for the reduction of the rates of postage, could not have been carried out to their full extent. The first essential to the success of those plans would have been wanting; for there would have been no sufficient means of conveying the greatly-increased mass of correspondence necessary to be carried in order to render the reduced rates of postage profitable. The old mail coaches were never planned for bulk, which would, indeed, have been fatal to that regularity and speed, upon which the Post Office could alone rely as the means of securing to the Government the monopoly of the letter carriage of the nation. The aggregate weight of the evening mails despatched from London in 1838, in twenty-eight mail coaches, amounted, as was shown by the Report of the Select Committee on Postage, to only 4 tons 6 cwt. or an average of about 3¼ cwt. per coach. But now on a Friday night, when so many thousands of weekly papers are sent into the country, the Post Office requires, on the London and North-Western Railway, not only the use of the travelling post-office which is provided for its convenience, but it occupies also six or eight additional vans. It is obvious, therefore, that if the existing system of the Post Office had been in operation, with the present results, in the days of mail-coach communication, not one mail alone, but fourteen or fifteen mails, such as were used in those days, would have been needed to carry on, with regularity, the Post Office traffic between (say) London and Birmingham. Nearly every coach that ran in 1830, between Birmingham and London, would now have been needed for Post Office purposes, if the London and North-Western Railway had not been brought into existence. The expenses would, consequently have been so large, that a universal penny postage would have entailed a certain loss. For the great blessing, therefore, derived from cheap postal communication, the nation is, in a great degree, indebted to the facilities offered by railways. It must be borne in mind here, that the boon conferred upon the public is not limited to written correspondence.