While the great transportation functions of the railroad are devoted to the comparatively simple problems of soliciting and carrying both passengers and freight in ordinary channels, there are, nevertheless, special functions of the carrier that demand some slight attention in passing. These functions might quite properly be known as the by-products of transportation. The most important of them are the carrying of small packages of rather greater value than that the railroad ordinarily gives to the goods that it handles in its own cars, and the carrying of letters and periodicals. These last two are handled as a monopoly by the Federal Government, which also competes with a half-dozen big private corporations in the transportation of merchandise in small individual lots. The Government calls its service the railroad mail and it is the bone and sinew of the Post-office Department. The private corporations, creeping in upon what is also generally a government monopolistic privilege in other lands, handle what they are pleased to call the express business. Their business has grown up alongside of that of the United States Government and the development of the two has run in very similar channels. * * * * * The express business, like a good many other big businesses, began in rather simple fashion. Before the railroad came into being, the citizens in the different towns of the young and rather sprawling nation along the Atlantic seaboard found it a difficult problem to communicate with one another. They used to entrust letters and valuable packages to the drivers of stage-coaches or to the captains of coasting-vessels. If the drivers or the captains remembered the letter-packet or the package, it was safely delivered. If they forgot--! So, when the railroad came and drove the old stage-lines out of business, the conductors of the trains were asked to accept this side responsibility as an informal part of their work. As long as this messenger function remained a slight thing, the railroads paid little attention to the practice, but after a while, the conductors got to paying more attention to it than to running the trains and the railroads finally had to stop it.