The probable effect of the adoption of my plan on the expenditure of the Post Office department was a question likely to elicit opposite opinions. It was to be considered, for instance, whether the staff then employed in the London Inland Office, viz., four hundred and five persons,[223] would suffice for that increase of correspondence on which I counted; or whether, again, supposing the increase not to be attained, it would, through economy of arrangement, admit of serious reduction. On these questions[224] there was much difference of opinion, even within the office. Thus, while one high official stated that payment in advance, even though it occasioned no increase of letters, would not enable the Post Office to dispense with a single clerk or messenger,[225] another was of opinion that four times the number of letters might be undertaken by the present number of hands.[226] Again, as to the sufficiency of the existing means of conveyance, the Superintendent of the Mail-coaches, after stating “that a mail-coach would carry of mail fifteen hundredweight, or one thousand six hundred and eighty pounds, represented that if the letters were increased to the extent assumed, the present mail-coaches would be unable to carry them;”[227] while Colonel Colby stated that the first circumstance which drew his attention to the cheapening of postage was that in travelling all over the kingdom, particularly towards the extremities, he had “observed that the mails and carriages which contained the letters formed a very stupendous machinery for the conveyance of a very small weight; that, in fact, if the correspondence had been doubled or trebled, or quadrupled, it could not have affected the expense of conveyance.”[228] To determine the question the committee directed a return to be made of the weight of the mail actually carried by the several mail-coaches going out of London. The average was found to be only 463 pounds,[229] or little more than a quarter of the weight which, according to Post Office evidence, a mail-coach would carry; and as it appeared, by other evidence, that the chargeable letters must form less than one-tenth of the weight of the whole mail, it was calculated by the committee that, with every allowance for additional weight of bags, the average weight of the chargeable letters might be increased twenty-four fold before the limit of 1,680 pounds would be reached. It was further shown that the weight of all the chargeable letters contained in the thirty-two mails leaving London was but 1,456 pounds; that is, less than the weight which a single mail-coach could carry.[230]