Cheap postage has now been fairly tried, and must be pronounced a grand success. It has become part and parcel of our national life, and has been found precious as the gift of a new faculty. We should miss the loss of cheap and rapid correspondence with our friends and acquaintances almost as much as the loss of speech or the loss of sight. The postman has now to find his way to the humblest, poorest districts, where twenty years back his knock was never heard; and what was once a rare luxury, has now come to be considered a common necessary of life. Instead of only seventy-six millions of letters passing through the post in a year, as in 1838, the number has risen to between seven and eight hundred millions. On the average every individual in England receives twenty-eight letters a-year (in London the individual average is forty-six), in Scotland eighteen, and in Ireland nine. The gross revenue derived from these sources is over four millions; and some of the railway companies each make more money out of the conveyance of the mails in a year, than the annual revenue of the whole kingdom in the days of William and Mary. The moral and social effects of the cheap postage are incalculable. It has tended to strengthen and perpetuate domestic ties, to bring the most scattered and distant members of a family under the benign influences of home, and to foster feelings of friendship and sympathy between man and man. Upon the education and intelligence of the people, too, it has had, concurrently with other causes, a marked effect. Many who looked upon the art of writing as only a temptation to forgery, were induced to take pen in hand and master the science of pot-hooks and hangers, for the sake of corresponding with their friends, and of being able to read the letters they received. In 1839 a third of the men and half of the women who were married, according to the registrar's returns, could not sign their own names; in 1857 that was the case with only a seventh of the men, and a fifth of the women; and not a little of this advanced education may be attributed to the impulse given by the introduction of cheap postage.