ers. What would be
the effect of carrying out this system, in breaking up the practice
complained of, or what would be the amount of inconvenience to travellers
and to business, of a thorough determination in the department to execute
such a law in the spirit of it, all can judge for themselves. The British
government, as we have seen, dared not entertain such a proposition. I
have no hesitation in saying, that such a system of coercion can never be
successfully executed here. It is better to meet the difficulty, as the
British government did, in a way to make the post-office at once the most
popular vehicle of transmission, and the greatest blessing which the
government can bestow upon the people. The New York Evening Post said,
years ago:

"Congress yields, and passes such a law. What then? Is Hydra dead?
By no means, its ninety-nine other heads still rear their crests,
and bid defiance to the secretary and his law. In Pearl street,
there will yet hang a bag for the deposit of the whole
neighborhood's letters,--at Astor House, and at Howard's, at the
American, and at the City Hotels, still every day will see the
usual accumulation of letters,--all to be taken by some 'private,'
trustworthy, obliging wayfarer, and by him be deposited in some
office at Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, Baltimore."

I have no doubt that the cheap transmission of letters, out of the mails,
is now becoming systematized and extended between our large cities, and an
immense amount of correspondence is also carried on between the large
cities and the towns around. The Boston Path-Finder contains a list of 240
"Expresses," as they are called, that is, of common carriers, who go
regularly from Boston to other towns, distant from three miles to three
hundred. Most of these men carry "mailable matter" to a great extent, in
their pockets or hats, in the shape of orders, memorandums, receipts, or
notes, sometimes on slips of paper, sometimes in letters folded in brown
paper and tied with a string, and not unfrequently in the form of
regularly sealed letters. If we suppose each one to carry, on an average,
ten in a day, a very low estimate, there are 750,000 letters brought to
Boston in a year by this channel alone. Everything which calls public
attention to the subject of postage, every increase of business causing an
increase of correspondence between any two places, every newspaper
paragraph describing the won