had by his father’s death just come into four millions of livres a year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the French by “a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his life”?  That was a short winter-passage, too—­more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal “from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut, dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785,” describing a voyage down the Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone and Du Chaillu do those of Africa.  The time is less now to Japan, and about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service—­far cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of the present Constitution between our own cities.  Our foreign service with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution undreamed of in that day—­the money-order system.  Under this admirable contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security than the regular banks formerly attained.

Still in its infancy, the international money-order system has already reached importance in the magnitude of its operations.  The sums sent by means of it were, in 1874, $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to Germany, and to the little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.

The dimensions to which this new method of financial intercourse between the different peoples of the globe is destined to reach may be inferred from the growth of the domestic money—­order service.  In 1874 the number of orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854.  The erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain that this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the old routine of cheque and draft, and become, among its other advantages, a currency regulator of no trifling value.

Our post-office may almost be said to head the development of the century.  The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it.  The advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered the post, while its return to them has been liberal.  Thus aided and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical progression.  Its development resembles that from the Annelids to the Vertebrata, the simple canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of the simplest animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775 from Falmouth to Savannah,