was but £144,000 (about one fifth). Dividing this by the number of paying letters, and allowing for the greater weight of newspapers, it left the cost for the average conveyance of each letter less than one tenth of a penny, an amount so small that any attempt to divide it, according to distance would be manifestly absured.

Further investigation proved, moreover, that the cost of conveyance per item of postal matter was not infrequently less for a long distance than for a short distance. Thus, in the case of the mail, on the longest and most important route in the kingdom, that from London to Edinburgh, some four hundred miles in length, the cost of the conveyance of the whole mail, per trip was five pounds, and this amount, divided according to the weight of the paying letters and newspapers, gave one sixth of a penny as the absolute cost for the conveyance of a newspaper of an average weight of one and one half ounces, and one thirty-sixth of a penny for that of a quarter-ounce letter.

These sums being the full cost for the whole distance, Mr. Hill assumed that the same rating would do for any place on the road. It was admitted on all sides, that the chief labor was expended in making up, opening, and delivering the mails; therefore, the fact whether it was carried one mile or one hundred, made comparatively little difference in the expenditure of the Post-office. The expense and trouble being much the same, perhaps even less at Edinburgh than at some in

termediate points, why should the charges be so different? But the case could be made still stronger. The mail for Louth, containing, as it did, comparatively few letters, cost the postal authorities, as the simple expense of transit, five farthings per letter.

Thus, an Edinburgh letter, costing an infinitesimal part of a farthing, paid a postage of one shilling and three halfpence, while a letter for Louth, costing the Post-office fifty times as much, paid but ten pence. Mr. Hill's opponents were therefore compelled either to accept his proposition, or to stand as the defenders of the existing system under which the highest price was often paid for the cheapest business.

"At first sight, it looked extravagant that persons residing at Penzance or the Giant's Causeway, at Waterford or Wick, should pay the same postage on their letters. In practical experience, however, it was the nearest possible approximation to perfect justice. The intrinsic value of the conveyance of a letter is a very different thing from the cost of such conveyance. The value of the service rendered by the Post-office in any particular case, is exactly equal to the time, trouble, and expense of the despatch of a private messenger on that particular errand, and may be fairly measured by distance, but it is the glory of the modern Postoffice that, by the use of its vast machinery, this burdensome expense is practically eliminated and all the resulting benefits are equally divided among

the whole people. On the other hand, the curse of our present system of railway rates, based on distance, consists in this, that it enables our railway managers to guage their charges so as to take to themselves nearly all the difference between the cost of conveyance by human burden-bearer or by ox-team and by railway. They are thus rapidly absorbing the wealth of the entire country.

Second. The postal rate is a tax, a tax on communication, a tax on the nervous system of the body politic, and it is a tax especially burdensome upon the poor. The postal rate, therefore, must be as low as possible, and it must be the same for all.

Third. The only power that can be safely entrusted with the right to levy postal taxes, is the General Government.

The experience of more than half a century has triumphantly demonstrated the truth of these propositions as applied to postal freight, and what is true of the postal business is equally true of ordinary railway traffic. The post-office and the railroad are indeed inseparably connected, and the common interest demands that both shall be under the same control, and shall be managed on the same principles. Not until the different governments of the world have applied the postal principle to telegraph and telephone rates on the one hand, and to railway rates on the other, under the control of the Post-office, will that great institution be able to perform its whole duty, as the grand

centre of the nation's circulating and nervous system.

The office of the letter, the newspaper, the telegraph, and the telephone is to give mankind information as to where and how they may best satisfy their wants and dispose of their wares. The business of the different agencies of public transportation (and the railway is the chief of these agencies), is to provide the public with the cheapest, the quickest, and the best possible machinery by which they can avail themselves of this information. It is doubtful if any one has an adequate idea of the evils that are certain to follow the continuance of the present system of private management of these great public works, with its franking privileges for the favored few, and its unjust and unstable taxation of the many, or, on the other hand, of the blessings that are equally certain to accrue to the people at large from the proposed widening of the sphere of the Post-office, with its system of equal, stable, just, and uniform taxation for all.

CHAPTER II.

ABUSES OF THE PRESENT

SYSTEM OF RAILWAY

MANAGEMENT.

THE railways are the circulating system of the country; the tracks are the arteries and veins; the trains are the life-bearing current; the freight and the passengers in the trains are the life itself. It is no more possible to discover the difference in the cost of the conveyance of freight and of passengers between the different stations of a railway system, than it is to measure the difference in the efforts of the human heart, whether the life essence be transported from one valve of the heart to the other, or from the life centre to the finger tips. In the one case, as in the other, the office of the circulating system is to relieve congestion here and starvation there, to the end that there may be a perfect body, complete in every part, and each part dependent upon and subservient to every other. In either case, the cost of transportation is a matter of life and death. Check the flow of the life blood to the hand and it withers and dries up; cut off an individual or a town from the national system of circulation, or what is practically the