a year.

Mr. Banning, postmaster at Liverpool, stated that, in return for
370,000 ship letters received at his office in a year, addressed
to persons elsewhere than at Liverpool, only 78,000 letters passed
through that office to be sent outwards. And yet the masters of
vessels assured him that the number of letters they conveyed
outwards was quite equal to the number brought inwards.

Mr. Maury, of Liverpool, said that on the first voyage of the
Sirius steamship to America, only five letters were received at
the post-office to go by her, while at least 10,000 were sent in a
bag from the consignee of the ship.

Mr. Bates stated that the house of Baring & Co. commonly sent two
hundred letters a week, in boxes, from London to Liverpool, to go
to America--equal to 10,000 a year.

These things were done under the very eye of the authorities, and yet no
means had been found to prevent it. What police can our government
establish, strict enough to do what the British government publicly
declared itself unable to do?

The correspondence, of the manufacturing towns, it appeared, was carried
on almost entirely in private and illicit channels. In Walsall, it was
testified that, of the letters to the neighboring towns, not one-fiftieth
were sent by mail. Mr. Cobden said that not one-sixth of the letters
between Manchester and London went through the post-office. Mr. Thomas
Davidson, of Glasgow, stated the case of five commercial houses in that
city, whose correspondence sent illegally was to that sent by post in the
ratio of more than twenty to one; one house said sixty-seven to one.

In Birmingham, a system of illicit distribution of letters had been
established through the common-carriers to all the neighboring towns, in a
circuit of fifteen miles, and embracing a population of half a million.
The price of delivering a letter in any of these places was 1_d._, and for
this the letters were both collected and delivered. Women were employed to
go round at certain hours and collect letters. They would collect them for
2_d_. per hundred, and make a living by it. The regular postage to those
towns was 4_d_., besides the trouble of taking letters to the post-office.
Hence there was both economy and convenience in the illicit arrangement.
The practice had existed for thirty years, and when it was brought in all
its details to the notice of parliament, no man seems to have d