Another feature of the railway mail train, as of the passenger train, is its capacity to carry any quantity of letters and post parcels that may require to be carried. In 1838, the aggregate weight of all the evening mails dispatched from London by twenty-eight mail-coaches was 4 tons 6 cwt., or an average of about 3-1/4 cwt. each, though the maximum contract weight was 15 cwt. The mails now are necessarily much heavier, the number of letters and packets having, as we have seen, increased more than tenfold since 1839. But it is not the ordinary so much as the extraordinary mails that are of considerable weight, more particularly the American, the Continental, and the Australian mails. It is no unusual thing, we are informed, for the last-mentioned mail to weigh as much as 40 tons. How many of the old mail-coaches it would take to carry such a mail the 79 miles' journey to Southampton, with a relay of four horses every five or seven miles, is a problem for the arithmetician to solve. But even supposing each coach to be loaded to the maximum weight of 15 cwt. per coach, it would require about sixty vehicles and about 1700 horses to carry the 40 tons, besides the coachmen and guards. * * * * * A few words, in conclusion, as to the number of men employed in working and maintaining railways. According to Mr. Mills,[1] 166,047 men and officers were employed in the working of 13,289 miles open in the United Kingdom in 1865, besides 53,923 employed on lines then under construction. The most numerous body of workmen is that of the laborers (81,284) employed in the maintenance of the permanent way. Being mostly picked men from the laboring class of the adjoining districts, they are paid considerably higher wages, and hence one of the direct effects of railways on the laboring population (besides affording them greater facilities for locomotion) has been to raise the standard of wages of ordinary labor at least 2_s_. a week in all the districts into which they have penetrated. The workmen next in number is that of the artificers (40,167) employed in constructing and repairing the rolling-stock; the porters (25,381), the plate-layers (12,901), guards and brakesmen (5799), firemen (5266), and engine-drivers (5171). But, besides the employés directly engaged in the working and maintenance of railways, large numbers of workmen are also occupied in the manufacture of locomotives and rolling-stock, and in providing the requisite materials for the permanent way. Thus the consumption of rails alone averages nearly 400,000 tons a year in the United Kingdom alone, while the replacing of decayed sleepers requires about 10,000 acres of forest to be cut down annually and sawn into sleepers. Taking the various railway workmen into account, with their families, it will be found that they represent a total of about three quarters of a million persons, or about one in fifty of our population,