"We have this day to announce a step which, simple and unpretending as it may seem, is really a greater move towards a complete unity of our independent empire than the most splendid conquest or the largest annexation. In reply to a deputation last Friday the Postmaster-General stated that as soon as the colonial assents could be obtained and the proper arrangements made, it was intended to reduce the postage of letters for every part of the British dominions abroad to the uniform rate of sixpence the half-ounce. The present average postage of colonial letters is not less than fourteen-pence. What will be gained is the low rate, _and the uniformity, which experience has shown to be scarcely less appreciated than cheapness_. Very shortly, therefore, it will be in the power of any of our readers to drop a letter into the box of the next cottage or in the next street, to his friends on the slopes of the Himalaya, or at Mount Alexander, or at Vancouver's Island, or at Toronto, with the certainty, as far as the whole power of Government can secure it, of having an answer back at the cost, for the postage of the two letters, of one shilling. The answer from across the Atlantic will probably be within a month; that from Simla or Lahore within three months; and that from the antipodes within half a year. A party of emigrants sailing this week may hope to arrive at Geelong or Adelaide soon after Midsummer, and about Michaelmas their friends at home, supposing the arrangement completed, may hope to receive full accounts of their voyage and safe arrival at the moderate cost of sixpence. Let people talk as they please of the sun never setting on our dominions, and of the British flag waving over every sea and every shore, nothing brings before our mind so forcibly the fact that we are everywhere, and that everywhere we represent the spirit of progress, as this little type of universal power--this letter given to the village postman in March, with an answer from mid-Asia in June. There is something grand and showy enough in the returns that appear from time to time in our military and naval journals, giving the stations of our ships and of soldiers in every part of the world; but the grandeur of the idea is qualified by many painful considerations, for the whole is merely an ill remedy for a still worse evil. But there is no such alloy in the thought that any member of the British Empire, comprehending an eighth of the human species, will be able to communicate with any other within a space of time and at a cost incredible to our forefathers, and even hitherto unattainable. Considering how much there is that is questionable in our dominion, in its means and in its results, it is satisfactory to find one means and one result of undoubted