Her Majesty's Mails

Little more than a hundred years ago, 50,000l. sufficed to pay for the entire mail service of the period; about half that sum being the extent of the charges properly appertaining to the Post-Office. Then, only a few continental mails and an occasional packet to the colonies of North America and the West Indies, were all that had to be sustained; even those were kept up at a considerable loss.[167] At that time the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand were in undisputed possession of these enormous colonies; the Dutch were then the only targets for the arrows of the Caffres in South Africa; Warren Hastings and Lord Clive were children at Daylesford and Market Drayton, and little dreamt of their subsequent career in the East; while the tide of emigration which has since carried Anglo-Saxon blood and Anglo-Saxon energy into every corner of the globe had not then, to any extent, set in. That a hundred years of unequalled internal progress has developed our great empire and called into life fresh and important agencies, what reflecting mind can doubt? For many recent years the packet service of the country, traversing every known sea to keep up a connexion with those whom the exigencies of life and commerce have dispersed so widely, has cost the nation something like a million sterling per annum!