become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office,
the locomotive variety, having been added to the old. This innovation,
of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels,
and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour,
already furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were
sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with
40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks. These
gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long
swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till
poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the
mail."

The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employés of the
department do not give it their whole time, many of the country
postmasters being engaged in other business. But the undivided efforts
of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the
handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards,
and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of
rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not
weight--stamps unknown. The introduction of stamps, with coincident
reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the
extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years;
the number of letters passing through the mails having within that
period multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the British
Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is
now but little in excess, having been in 1874 nine hundred and
sixty--seven millions. The immense difference between the two
countries in extent, and consequently in the average distance of
transportation, is enough to account for the contrast between the two
balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual deficit, while