shop-keepers to do post-office duty. The early
morning delivery has been extended to several
more places round the London district;
but, as regards the delivery of London letters,
changes are at this moment in progress for
the full success of which some little help is
needed from the public. Of the whole
number of letters delivered in the United
Kingdom nearly a quarter are delivered in
London and its suburbs; nearly half pass
through the London office. To facilitate the
London business and to increase despatch
in the delivery, it is now proposed to get
rid of the obstacle arising from the vast
bulk of the metropolis, by considering London,
not as one town, but as ten towns.
At present, a letter posted in one part of
London, and addressed to another part
close at hand, may have a circuit of five
or six miles to take; because the centre
of distribution is only Saint Martin's-le-Grand.
Letters from the country all pass
through the present central office, where they
are sorted once; then they must go into
their several districts; and then have to be
sorted again with reference to streets and
houses. By treating London as ten towns,
each with its own centre of operations,
this difficulty will be avoided. Country
letters will be delivered straightway—without
passing through an intermediate sorting—tothe parts of town for which they are destined;
and the sorters there, having the necessary
local knowledge, will distribute them immediately
into postmen's walks, and forward
them, at a saving of one, two, or three hours
of delay, to their several addresses. So, with
letters from one part of London to another.
A letter from Belgravia to Tyburnia will
go direct from place to place, instead of
travelling ten miles to and from St.
Martin's-le-Grand.

The ten towns, or independent
districts into which it is proposed to divide
London, are named from their relative
positions. Thus in the southern district,
will be included Kennington, Stockwell,
Brixton, Streatham, Mitcham, and Carshalton;
in the northern, Islington, Highbury,
Hornsey, Enfield, and a bit of Waltham
Cross. The north-western district will extend
from Camden Town to Harrow; the western,
from Oxford Street to Norwood; the
south-western, from Charing Cross to Hampton
Court and Sunbury; the eastern, from Bethnal
Green to Romford. The central, east
central, and west central, will include the city
and neighbourhoods adjacent.

But, from country postmasters, it will be
too much to expect any minute knowledge of
the geography of London. Residents in London
must, therefore, enable their provincial
correspondents to fall in with the new scheme
by appending the initial letters of their district
to the usual—or indeed often less than the
usual—addresses. "Liverpool Street, Bishopgate,
London," will become "Liverpool Street,
E. C., London," and "Hill Street, Berkely
Square," will shorten into "Hill Street, W."
Many addresses will be further simplified,
and post-office work facilitated, when the
new Board of Works has got rid of the duplicate
names of streets where they occur in the
same district. This appeal to the compass is
not absolutely necessary to the new plan;
although those letters on which it is not
made, may lose the chance of early delivery.

In respect of railways, the gain of the
Post Office, or the public, by their mail-trains
is in the enormous advantage of their
increased speed, and the power they give of
getting through the sorting and the carrying,
both at one time. There is no other kind of
gain; on the contrary, a money-loss, for
railway-companies complain that they are not
paid well enough. This complaint can be
hardly well-founded; for we learn that the old
cost of carrying the mails by coaches averaged
twopence farthing a mile, and that the
average price now paid for the same service
to railways is tenpence a mile; that under
the old system tenpence farthing was the
highest mile rate ever paid, and that it is
now sometimes as high as four shillings and
tenpence a mile; which is very much the same
sort of thing as a charge upon passengers of
four times the old coach fares for railway
travelling, in consideration of the benefit of
speed; with the complaint added, that
such payment is niggardly and wretched,
The cost of running a train may be
assumed in most cases to be about fifteen
pence per mile; and, upon this, the
post-office inquires of the public, whether it
is to be considered very stingy in paying
for the use of only a fraction of a train
at the rate of from sixty to two hundred
and sixty per cent. in excess of the whole
cost of running ? The argument that the
Rowland Hill system could not have existed
without railways, is sufficiently answered by
the curious fact that more than half the
transit of post letters is still effected by coaches
and carts. During the past year the average
number of miles performed by railways for
the post-office was twenty-seven thousand one
hundred miles per week-day, at an average
cost of tenpence per mile; while thirty-one
thousand six hundred miles per week-day
were traversed by mail-coaches and mail-carts,
at an average cost of twopence farthing
per mile.

We add a paragraph of miscellaneous
facts. Of the whole number of Valentines
sent through the post (eight hundred thousand),
the supply furnished by Ireland is on
the decrease. In England and Scotland, on
the increase. Through France alone there
passed last year two millions of letters
between the people of this country
and their sons, fathers, brothers and
friends who had gone out to battle in the
East. The number of mis-sent and returned
letters in the United Kingdom has now