The Irish railways receive £84,508 per annum from the Post Office, of which the Great Southern and Western (420 miles), obtains £29,500; the Midland Great Western (261), £14,920; Irish North-Western (145), £1,540; Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford (107), £4,700; Ulster (106), £5,800; Belfast and Northern Counties (100), £2,950; Great Northern and Western (83), £2,349; Waterford and Limerick (77), £3,150; Dublin and Drogheda (75), £4,700; Dublin and Belfast Junction (63), £6,000; Londonderry and Enniskillen (60), £3,150; Belfast and County Down (44), £206; Londonderry and Coleraine (36), £1,300; Cork and Youghal (34), £1,150; Waterford and Kilkenny (31), £486; Cork and Limerick direct (25), £50; Cork and Bandon (20), £757. There are three companies that only receive £30 each, and two have twice as much as the Pontop and Jarrow. They have £10 each. The average Post Office payment per mile (assuming that the Post Office sent mails by all the railways in Ireland, which is not the case) is about £44. 10s. The Scotch railways receive £78,482, of which the North British and Edinburgh and Glasgow (748) has £8,696; Caledonian (573), £29,101; Scottish Central and Scottish North-Eastern (459), £22,136; Great North of Scotland; (257), £3,830; Glasgow and South-Western (249), £3,436; the Highland Railway (245), £10,454. The average per mile per annum paid to Scotch railways by the Post Office, assuming that it availed itself of the whole of them, is £36. There is no branch of the connection between the railways and the Post Office in which the former has gained more conspicuously than in that of speed;[46] and precisely the same may also be said with respect to the general community. As has already been stated, the average speed of mail coaches was a little under ten miles an hour in 1837, that of stage coaches under eight, that of waggons two; and that the latter were used in the middle of the last century, at all events, we have pictorial evidence, through the pencil of Hogarth, and written testimony from the writings of his contemporaries, as well as from those of subsequent men of letters. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, substituted between its two termini an average speed of 17 miles an hour. Speed has increased steadily year by year, as we shall now endeavour to make manifest. In 1842 the night mail train left Euston Station at 8·30 p.m., and reached Lancaster (241 miles) at 7·0 a.m. Since the 1st of October, 1860, the Scotch Limited Mail leaves Euston Station every evening at 8·35 p.m., it arrives at Perth at 8·59 a.m. the next day; the distance is 449 miles, and it is performed, including ten stoppages, at the rate of 37½ miles an hour. There were more stoppages for mail trains in 1840 than since 1860, but, apart from this fact, the time that the mail train required to complete 449 miles is the same as that which it required to complete only 15 miles more than half that distance, twenty years previously.