The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer - Lighthouse ...

RAILWAY SYSTEM AND ITS RESULTS. 465
office, is the facility afforded for conveying bulk. It is not too much
to say that, without railway facilities, the excellent plans of Mr. Row-
land Hill, for the reduction of the rates of postage, could not have
been carried out to their full extent. The first essential to the success
of those plans would have been wanting ; for there would have been
no sufficient means of conveying the greatly increased mass of corre-
spondence necessary to be carried, in order to render the reduced
rates of postage profitable. The old mail coaches were never planned
for bulk, which would, indeed, have been fatal to that regularity and
speed upon which the Post-office could alone rely, as the means of
securing to the Government the monopoly of the letter-carriage of the
nation. The aggregate weight of the evening mails dispatched from
London in 1838, in twenty-eight mail-coaches, amounted, as was shown
by the Report of the Select Committee on Postage, to only 4 tons 6 cwt.,
or an average of about 3^ cwt. per coach. But now, on a Friday
night, when so many thousands of weekly papers are sent into the
country, the Post-office requires, on the London and Northwestern
Railway, not only the use of the travelling post-office which is provided
for its convenience, but it occupies also six or eight additional vans.
It is obvious, therefore, that if the existing system of the Poslroffice
had been in operation, with the present results, in the days of mail-
coach communication, not one mail alone but fourteen or fifteen mails,
such as were used in those days, would have been needed to carry on,
with regularity, the Post-office traffic between (say) London and Birmingham.
Nearly every coach that ran in 1830, between Birmingham
and London, would now have been needed for Post-office purposes, if
the Loudon and Northwestern Railway had not been brought into
existence. The expenses would, consequently, have been so large,
that a universal penny postage would have entailed a certain loss.
For the great blessing, therefore, derived from cheap postal communi-
cation, the nation is, in a great degree, indebted to the facilities of-
fered by railways.
It must be borne in mind, here, that the boon conferred upon the
public is not limited to written correspondence. Viewed in reference
to the postal facilities they afford, the railways are the great public
instructors and educators of the day. Contrast the size of " The
Times" in 1830 and 1856. Do you suppose that the huge mass of
paper, which you are permitted to forward by to-night's post, would
have been conveyed upon the same terms, if the means of conveyance
had remained limited to the mail and its four horses ? Look at the
immense mass of Parliamentary Reports and documents, now distrib-
uted every session amongst all the constituencies of the empire, at
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