The inland messages increased by leaps and bounds from 397,289 in 1867 to 2,118,373 in 1876; and still the receipts from them did not cover the operating expenses. In 1874 and 1875, for example, those expenses averaged 14 cents per message. Accordingly, in 1877, the Government adopted a new scale of charges on inland messages, to wit: an initial charge of 6 cents per message, to which was added 0.5 cent for every word transmitted. The Government assumed that the average length of the inland messages would be 14 words; and that the average receipts per message would be 13 cents. It hoped soon to reduce the average cost per message below 13 cents, and hoped thus to make the inland traffic remunerative. But those expectations never were realized; and to this day the inland messages have been carried at a loss.[11] [Sidenote: _French Experience_] In 1861, the French State telegraphs reduced the rate for messages of 20 words, counting the address, to 20 cents for intradepartmental[12] messages, and to 40 cents for interdepartmental messages. In 1866 the average receipts per message were: 38 cents on the inland traffic; $1.38 on the foreign traffic; and 55.8 cents on the traffic as a whole. With these average receipts per message, the earnings were $1,541,519; while the operating expenses were $1,796,692. In other words, the State telegraphs lost $255,173 on the working, besides failing to earn any interest on the capital invested in them, $4,760,000. In making the foregoing statement, no allowance is made for the value of the messages sent "on public service," messages for which the State would have been obliged to pay, had the telegraphs been owned or operated by companies. No such allowance can be made, because the several official French statements submitted by Mr. Scudamore as to the number of messages sent "on public service" applied to the years 1865 and 1867, years for which the operating expenses were not given. Furthermore, the messages sent on public service in 1865 and 1867 were so numerous as to indicate so loose a construction of the term "on public service" as to make the returns worthless for the purpose of determining the commercial value of the saving resulting to the State from the public ownership of the telegraphs. For 1865, the number of messages "on public service" was returned as 568,647, the equivalent of 23 per cent. of the number of messages sent by the public. For 1867, the number was returned as 168,999, the equivalent of 5.94 per cent. of the messages sent by the public. That those figures represented an unreasonable resource to the telegraph for the transaction of the State's business, is proved by the fact that in the United Kingdom, in the period 1871 to 1890, the value of the messages sent "on public service" was equivalent to less than 2 per cent. of the sums paid by the public for the transmission of telegraphic messages. On the basis of any reasonable use of the telegraphs "on public service,"