In addition to these economies, and others set out more fully in Chapter II., there will also be great economy in the working expenses of the Post Office itself, including the telegraph and telephone services. The actual effect of the amalgamation of the two services of railways and Post Office on the total working expenses of the combined services cannot be estimated with any degree of accuracy, but there can be no doubt that it will result in large economies. The working expenses of both, must, of course, be lumped together. No advantage can possibly be gained by attempting to separate the expenses of various branches of one State Department. This has actually been attempted in the case of the telegraph service, one of the numerous branches of the Post Office. It has been continually asserted that this service has been, and is being, carried on at a loss, especially since the introduction of the sixpenny rate. This assertion has always been an enigma to me, for how any proper apportionment of the working expenses of over 20,000 Post Offices throughout the United Kingdom can be made, in order to ascertain what proportion is to be attributed to the telegraph service alone, passes comprehension! That this impossible task has been attempted, and apparently carried out to the satisfaction of some persons in authority, does not prove that the alleged loss has actually been made, but only that a large amount of time and expense has been lost in elaborate and costly calculations, which can be of no possible advantage to the service or the Country! It is to be hoped that this attempt will not be continued with the telephone service. If, and when, the scheme proposed in this pamphlet for combining railways with the General Post Office is carried into effect, I trust that no such expensive and useless task will be attempted as to endeavour to ascertain what proportions respectively of the expenses of running the Royal Railways are to be attributed to carrying His Majesty’s Mails on the one hand, or His Majesty’s subjects and their goods on the other! It is quite evident that on the two services being combined a portion of the present working expenses of the Post Office, namely, those which now consist of amounts paid to the Railway Companies for carriage of mails, for rents of telegraph and telephone wires, and other services rendered, will be swallowed up in the general working expenses, just as the gross receipts of the Post Office will swell the total revenue of the combined services.