"This sort of mystification is even more surprising than that under which certain uneducated individuals (Irish) have been known to labour. The belief has more than once been manifested at a money order office window that the mere payment of the commission would be sufficient to procure an order for five pounds; the form of paying in the five pounds being deemed purely optional. An Irish gentleman (who had left his hod at the door) recently applied in Aldersgate Street for an order for five pounds on a Tipperary post office; for which he tendered (probably congratulating himself on having hit upon so good an investment) sixpence. It required a lengthened argument to prove to him that he would have to pay the five pounds into the office before his friend could receive that small amount in Tipperary; and he went away, after all, evidently convinced that his not having this order was one of the personal wrongs of Ireland, and one of the particular injustices done to hereditary bondsmen only. * * * * * "Despite the prodigious increase in the business of the department which we have pointed out, its efficiency has been doubled, and its cost almost halved. By superseding seventy-eight superfluous ledgers, the labour of sixty clerks has been saved; by simply reducing the size of the money orders and advices, the expense of paper and print alone has been diminished by £1,100 per annum; while the abolition of separate advices of each transaction has economised the number of letters by 46,000 weekly. The upshot is, that these economical reforms have effected a saving in the Money Order Office alone equal to £17,000 _per annum_." As a supplement to the foregoing extracts I quote from my Journal the following statistical record:-- "_June 7th, 1853._--The accounts of the Money Order Office for 1852 show an increase of profit of £4,227, making a total for the year of £11,664. In 1847, when I took to the department, there was a loss of £10,600 a year; so that the effective saving is upwards of £22,000 a year." GENERAL ECONOMIC MEASURES. Various improvements noticeable under this head (some of them of considerable importance) are omitted here as being more conveniently mentioned under other categories, as Money Orders, Conveyance of Mails, Packet Service, &c. The following, though of economic tendency, was, as will be perceived, more beneficial in another respect:--