Her Majesty's Mails

6. The English Postmaster-General is frequently supposed to have some control over colonial post-offices, and even those of foreign countries. Except at Gibraltar and Malta, however, he is quite powerless out of the United Kingdom. 7. Frequent applications are made, it seems, for extra foreign and colonial mails, yet those existing are only kept up at a ruinous loss. Of the eight great lines of packet communication, only one pays its expenses and yields a profit. If the letters sent abroad were charged with the whole cost of the packets, the foreign agencies, and other incidental expenses, not only would all the sea-postage be swallowed up, but the mails would entail a loss of nearly four hundred thousand pounds a year. "We want," said a leading weekly commercial paper lately, "increased facilities for communication with our West Indian Colonies;" yet every letter now forwarded to those colonial possessions of ours costs one shilling over and above the postage charged! On each letter conveyed between this country and the Cape there is a dead loss of sixpence; to the West Coast of Africa, one shilling and sixpence. Everybody has heard of the New Galway line of packets for America, now suspended for the second time: every letter carried by these packets under their first contract was charged one, and cost the country six shillings; under the second attempt, each letter is said to have cost even more than six shillings! With the change of system and change of management, described briefly in speaking of the packet service, there can be no question that this state of things will not be allowed to continue. The principle of requiring the colonies themselves to pay a moiety of the cost of their service is a step in the right direction, and is, certainly, only just:[198] the colonies will not be taxed for the mother-country, as in one memorable instance in history, nor, as at present, will the mother-country be taxed unfairly for the colonies: there will then be equal interest in keeping down the expenditure, and in establishing rates of postage high enough to be remunerative.