It may here be noticed that the decisions which the postmasters-general received were not all of them conceived in the same spirit. So different indeed was the treatment of questions relating to home communications and communications with foreign parts as almost to suggest that they had been referred to different tribunals. Was the packet service which had come to an end through Dummer's misfortunes to be re-established or not? The cost was far, very far, in excess of the receipts; and yet the direction to the Post Office was to consult the West India merchants, and to be guided by their wishes. The two packets between Falmouth and the Groyne, which had been left running at the close of the war, were after a time discontinued. They cost £1600 a year to maintain, and the annual receipts from the letters and passengers they carried were less than £450. Yet upon a representation from the merchants trading with Spain pointing out the inconvenience which the stoppage had caused them, the boats were restored at once. But all such questions were decided by the Lord Treasurer himself, and his decisions were communicated under his own signature, or else under the sign-manual. Very different was it with questions affecting intercourse within the kingdom. These, urgently as the postmasters-general might press them, received little or no attention. They would seem indeed to have been relegated to subordinates, who having been instructed to keep down expense proceeded to obey their orders without discrimination. Whether the packet agent at Dover had in his cups refused to drink to the health of the ministers, or whether the postmaster of Chester had said that Queen Anne, had she pursued the same course as was pursued by Charles the First, would have met with the same fate--these were questions of vital importance which must be investigated with all convenient speed; but when the question was merely one of improving the internal posts of the country, it was treated at leisure, and no considerations of public convenience, or even of prospective gain, were allowed to weigh against the bugbear of present expense. In 1710, for instance, the Lord Provost and magistrates of Glasgow had petitioned that the foot-post to Edinburgh might be converted into a horse-post. The mail would thus arrive sooner and leave later, and, as the petitioners pointed out, letters would fall into it which had heretofore been sent by private hand. Between a horse-post and a foot-post the difference in point of cost was £20 a year; and for the sake of this small sum the Treasury had refused the request, just as they now refused to sanction the appointment of surveyors, although the postmasters-general clearly demonstrated that by no other means could the misappropriation of postage be checked, and that within a few months the cost would be covered many times over.