The Post Office discharges three functions in connection with letters and other postal documents. They are, collection, transmission, and delivery. The first and last are performed by Post Office servants; transmission, except for certain portions of foot rural transport, is invariably by contract. It is transmission alone that makes a letter of value as a means of intercommunication between persons residing, or situated, more or less distantly from one another. If, as traders, we purchased a ton of letter paper, its price would probably be about £62, or say 7d. a pound; and supposing it came some 80 to 100 miles, its cost would be increased by another twenty shillings, a sixty-second of the first cost of the article. Convert this pound, or this ton of paper into a ton of written letters, and, if we take each chargeable letter at a third of an ounce (the Post Office considers each to weigh a little more than a quarter of an ounce, but for the purposes of this calculation they are taken at the higher figure), a pound of letters, with a postage[51] stamp on each letter, becomes worth four shillings to the Post Office, instead of sevenpence as a pound of paper; and, by the same process, a ton becomes changed from £63 to £448. The total cost of the Post Office service for 1865 was £2,941,086; the net revenue, £1,482,522, a little over 50 per cent.; consequently, a ton of letters, by no act of the Post Office, except by its monopoly, which recent criminal proceedings show that it is determined to interpret rigidly, is worth £225 net to it. According to the ideas of Messrs. Hill (2), Page, and Gregory, the railway should carry the ton of paper, converted into letters, at a high rate of speed, and with numerous conditions of a penal character, at the same scale of payment, or, if possible, at a lower, than the price which was charged for the original ton of paper sent by ordinary goods train, at slow speed, and without any special conditions attached to its conveyance. The railway companies are willing to carry letters and other postal matter at a rate not bearing any proportion or ratio whatever to the profit which the monopoly gets the benefit of by their conveyance, but at a fair and equitable scale of remuneration, which scale shall be decided, in case of difference, by two impartial men (Mr. Gregory, do you come _quite_ within that definition?), and if they disagree, by an umpire who, at all events, is expected to be impartial.