Her Majesty's Mails

Of course, this Post-Office machinery, which we have attempted to describe, is necessarily delicate and liable to derangements, inasmuch as it has to depend to a great extent on the proper carrying out throughout the country of an infinite number of railway arrangements. Its successful working is doubtless primarily due to the special time chosen for the conveyance of mails. The ordinary traffic disposed of, the mail-trains take its place, and through the long night the best part of the Post-Office work is accomplished. The good or bad management of railway companies may assist or retard the efficiency of the Post-Office to an almost incalculable extent. The railway post-office is like a gigantic machine, one part interdependent on another, and all alike dependent on the motive power of the different contracting parties. Railway accidents are fruitful sources of discomfiture to the Post-Office Department. The mail-trains have, within the last two or three years, enjoyed an immunity from any very serious calamity of this nature: yet even when this is not the case, it very seldom happens that the Post-Office arrangements suffer, except on the particular journey wherein the accident occurred. Fresh supplies of men and matériel are summoned with a speed that would, or ought to, surprise some other commissariat departments, and the work proceeds the next day or night as if the equilibrium had never been disturbed.