If we had to go back to mail coaches, and each were only to carry the average of 1837, we should require 100 mail coaches and 13,300 horses; but if each were loaded to its Post Office maximum of former times, then _only_ 27 coaches and 3,591 horses would be requisite. At what cost for 27 coaches? Certainly, the former average of 2½d. a mile would no longer be attainable. More than double would be demanded. 13s. 6d. a mile per diem for 133 miles, multiplied by 365 days, is £32,785. Yet the highest price that the London and North-Western ever had for its night mail service was 4s. the double mile, £9,709. This is one answer to the assertion of Mr. Page in his report, “Not only, therefore, would penny postage without railways have been both practicable and remunerative, but it would have been even more profitable[35] (assuming the increase of letters) than it is now.” We learn from Mr. Howell, the Secretary of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Company, that on Australian mail mornings the weight of mails is 46 tons; to carry these at the rate of 15 cwt. per mail coach from London to Southampton, 78 miles, it would he necessary to have 61 coaches and 4,758 horses, besides guards and coachmen. As mails, although not near so heavy as the Australian, are continually arriving at and departing from Southampton, it would be necessary to keep up at least the above stock both of bi-and quadru-peds for these 78 miles, at a cost of about £30,000 a year; but reference to the Post Office estimates will show that the annual payment made by the department to the London and South-Western Company is £21,950, and for that sum the Post Office has the right not only to receive and despatch its sea-going mails, but to use every one of the Company’s trains over the 503 miles which constitute its system, for Post Office inland business. How, it may be asked again, can any officer of the department assert in a report (designated by the Postmaster-General “an able report”) that the penny postage “would have been even more profitable without railways than it now is”?