Facsimile PDF - Online Library of Liberty

284 METHODS OF SOCIAL REFORM.
electric telegraph is ite weak point. The London District
Telegraph Company have not succeeded in paying dividends,
although their low charges brought plenty of business. The
French line8 are worked at a considerable loss to the Government.
Belgium is a country of very small area, which decreases
the cxpcnse of the telegraphs, and yet the reduction of rate has
caused a sacrifice of net revenue only partially made up by
the higher profih upon international messages in transit.
It is quite apparent that the telegraphs are less favourably
eituated than the Post Office as regards the cost of transmission.
Two letters arc as easily carried and delivered at one house as
a single lettor, and it is certain that the expenses of the Post
Office clo not incrcnse in anything like the same rat,io as tho
work it performs. Thus mhilo the total postal revenue has
increnscci from 23,035,954, in 1856, to &.4,~123,608, in 1865, or
by 46 per cent., representing a great increase of work done, the
total cost of t'hc scrvice has risen only from &2,438,732, in 1856,
to &2,041,086 in 1865, or by 31 per cent. In the case of the
telegraphs, howecclr, two messages with delivery by special
messenger cause just twice tho trouble of one message. The
l'ost Office, by periodical deliveries, may reduce the cost of
dolivery 011 its own principles, but it cannot apply these
principles to thc actual operations of telegraphy; it cannot
send a hundred Inessagcs at the same cost, and in the same
tirus as one, like it can send one hundred letters in a bag
almost as c~~sily ns one letter. It is truc that the rapidity
of transrnisvion of mcsanges through R. wire can be greatly
increased by thc use of Unin's telegraph, or any of the
numerous instrumcntu in which the signals are made by a
perforated slip of paper, or a set of type prepared beforehand.
But theso inventions ccouomise the wires only, not the labour
of the operators, since it takes as much time and labour to set
up the message in type or perforated paper as to transmit it
direct by the common instrument. Economy is to be found,
rather, in some simple rapid inst,rument of direct transmission,
liko the Acoustic telegraph, than in any elaborate mechanical
method of siprrlling. There is no reason, as far as we can see
at present, to suppose that n Government department will