In 1851, the Electric and International Telegraph Company carried 99,216 messages, receiving on an average $2.41 per message. In 1856, the year in which the Scotch Chambers of Commerce began the agitation for nationalization, the company carried 812,323 messages, receiving on an average $0.99 per message. In 1865, the year in which the telegraph companies abolished the rate of 24 cents, irrespective of distance, that had been in force between the leading cities, and the Chambers of Commerce increased the agitation for purchase by the State, the Electric and International carried 2,971,084 messages, receiving on an average $0.49 a message. In the period from 1851 to 1867, the messages carried by the company increased on an average by 28.76 per cent. a year; the average receipts per message decreased on an average by 7.58 per cent. a year; and the gross receipts of the company increased on an average by 13.61 per cent. a year. In the period 1855 to 1866, the messages carried annually by the British and Irish Magnetic Company grew from 264,727 to 1,520,640, an average annual growth of 17.58 per cent. At the same time the average receipts per message fell from $0.96 in 1855, to $0.48 in 1866. In the period from 1855 to 1866, the number of messages carried annually by all of the telegraph companies of the United Kingdom increased from 1,017,529, to 5,781,989, an average annual increase of 16.36 per cent. In the same period, from 1855 to 1866, the telegrams sent in Switzerland increased on an average by 13.14 per cent. each year; those sent in Belgium increased on an average by 31.45 per cent.; and those sent in France increased on an average by 25.40 per cent. When one takes into consideration that in Belgium, in 1867, only 38 per cent. of the messages transmitted related to stock exchange and commercial business, and that in France in the same year only 48 per cent. of the messages sent related to industrial, commercial, and stock exchange transactions, there is nothing in the comparison between the rate of growth in the United Kingdom on the one hand, and in the countries of Continental Europe on the other hand, to indicate that the use of the telegraphs for the purposes of trade and industry was held back in the United Kingdom by excessive charges or by lack of telegraphic facilities. So far as the United Kingdom lagged behind, it did so because the public had not learned to use the telegraphs freely for the transmission of personal and family news. And when, in 1875, under State owned telegraphs, the public of the United Kingdom had learned to use the telegraphs as freely as the public of Continental Europe used them, Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, the eminent British political economist, in the course of a review of the price paid for this free use of the telegraphs, said: "A large part of the increased traffic on the Government wires consists of complimentary messages, or other