“with as many cross-posts as he shall see fit.”  Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure.  In 1790 four millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices and 1875 miles of post-roads.  The revenue of the department was $37,935—­little over a thousandth of what it is at present under rates of postage but a fraction of the old.  New York and Boston heard from each other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.  Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and insisted on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through in two days each way, or a twentieth of the present speed.  On the interior routes chaos ruled supreme.  Newspapers and business-men combined to employ riders who meandered along the mud roads as it pleased Heaven.

When the new government machine had smoothed down its bearings matters rapidly improved.  In 1800 we had 903 post-offices and 20,817 miles of road.  In 1820 these figures changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870 to 28,492 offices and 231,232 miles.  Five years later 70,083 miles of railway, 15,788 by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented the web woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its weary way.  Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent of routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails having become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office, the locomotive variety, having been added to the old.  This innovation, of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels, and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour, already furnishes us with gigantic statistics.  In 1875 there were sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with 40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks.  These gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of “waiting for the mail.”

The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employes of the department do not give it their whole time, many of the country postmasters being engaged in other business.  But the undivided efforts of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards, and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not weight—­stamps unknown.  The introduction of stamps, with coincident reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years; the number of letters passing through the mails having within that period multiplied twenty-fold.  The number transmitted in the British Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is now but little in excess,