It is not without full reflection that the committee insist on the principle that it was the duty as well as the right of the government thus to avail itself, even at heavy additional expense, of the powerful agency of steam, for the purpose of accelerating the mails. It would have been a gross and manifest dereliction to have permitted that vitally important concern, the transportation of the mail—a concern so anxiously intrusted by the constitution to the federal authority—it would have been, in the opinion of the committee, a gross and manifest dereliction to have permitted it to lag behind the improvements of the age, and to be outstripped by the pace of ordinary travel and commercial communication. Such is the view which the Post Office Department avowedly takes of its own obligations, and upon which it habitually acts. To be outstripped by private expresses, or by the ordinary lines of travel, is deemed discreditable to the department, injurious to the general interests of the country, and a thing, therefore, not to be permitted. This great and fundamental principle upon which the departments acts, (of not being outstripped in the transmission of correspondence and intelligence,) led necessarily to subsidizing the steam-engine into the service of the post office; and it must and will lead, with equal certainty, to a like adoption of any other newly discovered agency or contrivance possessing decided advantage of celerity over previously used methods. It is not probable, however, that the government will ever find itself called upon to make any transition wider or more striking than that already so familiar to us—a transition from the use of animal power to the tremendous enginery of the steam-engine; from common roads to iron railways; from land carriage to the conversion of rivers, lakes, and the ocean itself, into post roads. The same principle which justified and demanded the transference of the mail on many chief routes, from the horse-drawn coach on common highways to steam-impelled vehicles on land and water, is equally potent to warrant the calling of the electro magnetic telegraph—that last and most wondrous birth of this wonder-teeming age—in aid of the post office, in discharge of its great function of rapidly transmitting correspondence and intelligence. And the only question to be considered, in determining whether it ought to be so called in aid, is a question of fact—namely, whether said telegraph possesses, over the modes of transmission now in use by the department, any advantages of sufficient value to justify the expense of engraftment on the system.