Benjamin Franklin was appointed General Deputy Postmaster of the Colonies, in the year 1753, with a salary between him and his confederates, of £600, if they could get it. This experiment brought him in debt £900, and his success in expediting the mails, which he dwells upon with so much satisfaction in his writings, will create a smile in these days of electricity, steam, and “young-American” speed. In the year 1754, he gave notice that the mail to New England, which used to start but once a fortnight, in winter, should start once a week, all the year, “whereby answers might be obtained to letters between Philadelphia and Boston in three weeks, which used to require six weeks!” Franklin was removed from his office by the British Ministry; but in the year 1775, the Congress of the Confederation having assumed the practical sovereignty of the Colonies, appointed a committee to devise a system of post-office communication, who made a report recommending a plan on the 26th of July, which on the same day was adopted, and Doctor Franklin unanimously appointed Postmaster-General, at a salary of $1,000 per annum. The salary of the Postmaster-General was doubled on the 16th of April, 1779, and on the 27th day of December, of the same year, Congress increased the salary to $5,000 per annum. An Inspector of Dead Letters was also appointed, at a salary of $100 per annum, who was under oath faithfully and impartially to discharge the duties of his office, and enjoined to take no copies of letters, and not to divulge the contents to any but Congress, or to those who were appointed by Congress for that purpose. Dr. Franklin, on the 7th of November, 1776, was succeeded as Postmaster-General by his relative, Richard Bache, who remained in office till the 28th of January, 1782, when he was succeeded by Ebenezer Hazard, who was the last head of the General Post-Office under the Confederacy. In 1790, there were but seventy-five post-offices in the United States, and but eighteen hundred and seventy-five miles of post _routes_. The General Post-Office, in 1790, was located in New York, and Samuel Osgood, of Massachusetts, was the first Postmaster-General under the Federal Government. His conception of the duties of his office were, doubtless, very humble, as he recommended “that the Postmaster-General should not keep an office separate from the one in which the mail was opened and distributed; that he might, by his presence, prevent irregularities, and rectify any mistakes that might occur;” in fact, put the Postmaster-General, his assistant, and their one clerk, in the city post-office, to see that its mails were assorted and made up correctly.