the department are rapidly falling off, and a
remedy must in some way be found for this alarming evil, or the
very consequences so much dreaded by some from the reduction
proposed, will inevitably ensue; namely, a great curtailment of
the service, or a heavy charge upon the national treasury for its
necessary expenses. It is believed that in consequence of the
disfavor with which the present rates and other regulations of
this department are viewed, and the open violations of the laws
before adverted to, that not more than, if as much as one half the
correspondence of the country passes through the mails; the
greater part being carried by private hands, or forwarded by means
of the recently established private expresses, who perform the
same service, at much less cost to the writers and recipients of
letters than the national post-office. It seems to the committee
to be impossible to believe that there are but twenty-four or
twenty-seven millions of letters per year, forwarded to distant
friends and correspondents in the United States, by a population
of twenty millions of souls; whilst, at the same time, there are
_two hundred and four millions_ and upwards of letters passing
annually through the mails of Great Britain and Ireland, with a
population of only about twenty-seven millions."

The Senate Report recommended the reduction of the rates of postage to
five and ten cents, an average of seven and a half cents, with a very
great restriction of the franking privilege, on which it was confidently
estimated that the revenues of the department, for the first year of the
new system, would be $4,890,500; and that the number of chargeable letters
would be sixty millions. The House Report recommended stringent measures
to suppress the private mails, with the abolition of franking, without any
reduction of postage, except to substitute federal coin for Spanish. It
estimated the increase of letters to be produced by reducing the rates to
five and ten cents, at only thirty per cent. in number, thus reducing the
postage receipts at once to two and a half millions of dollars. It will be
seen that each of these calculations has been proved to be erroneous.

The great postage meeting in New York, held in December, 1843, had asked
for a uniform rate of five cents. After stating the advantages of the
English system, their committee still hung upon the