We must ask permission to go as far back as the year 1838. In that year, as we learn by a return laid before the Committee of the House of Commons which sat on Postal Reform, and which was presided over by the late Mr. Robert Wallis, M.P. for Glasgow, that the daily mileage of mail coaches in 1838 was 24,613, and the payments for this mileage were £84,103, being an average of 2¼d. per single mile. And we learn also, by an article that appeared in _Fraser’s Magazine_ of September, 1862, written, as we understand, by Mr. M. D. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, from information evidently supplied from official sources, that the weight of the letters carried throughout the kingdom in 1838, was 750 tons. We find likewise, by returns furnished to Mr. Wallis’s Committee, that letters formed 7 per cent. of the total weight of mails, consequently the weight of mails for the whole year 1838, was 10,500 tons. The latest dated Postmaster-General’s Report, which contains details of postal mileage is that of the 30th of April, 1863. It specifies that the mails travelled daily 49,782 miles by railway in 1862, at an average charge for the whole kingdom of 6¾d. per mile. In the same year “mails were conveyed by mail coaches, omnibuses, mail carts, &c., exclusive of conveyance of mail bags from one part of a town to another,” 33,371 miles each day, at an average cost of 2½d. a mile. In 1866, the railway postal mileage, according to the evidence and statements furnished to the Royal Commissioners on Railways, was 60,000 miles a day, or, with deductions for greatly diminished mileage on Sundays, Good Friday, and Christmas Day, about 18,780,000 miles per annum. The total amounts paid to railway companies by the Post Office was £570,502, or about 7½d. per single mile. The total weight of mails carried by railways is certainly not less than 110,000 tons, so that, whilst the payments to railway companies in 1866 were about seven times as much as they were to mail coaches in 1838, the weight of mails carried is nearly ten and a-half times as great. But the rate of speed has been _quadrupled_ in the course of a few years. In the olden time, increase of speed of even _half a mile an hour_, always added considerably to mileage cost, but by railways, the old ten miles an hour are converted into forty, with much diminished cost,—weight for weight carried.