The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

CHAPTER VII MOTOR MAILS In my first chapter I made a point of the fact that at the moment when travelling by mail coach had reached its highest point of excellence the coming of the railway gave the death-blow to the whole system. The long-distance traffic of this country was in the course of a few years diverted from the main roads, and for thirty years these thoroughfares, save for the local traffic between neighbouring places, were silent and unused. Nowhere was this revolution more noticeable than in the district round London. The Great North Road was perhaps the busiest of all the coach routes, and in 1832 no fewer than between fifty and sixty coaches, twenty of them mail coaches, ran on this road alone. At Barnet, the first stage out of London, the double trips resulted in a coach passing through the town in one direction or the other every quarter of an hour. The coaching inn with its courtyard and fine stabling fell from its high estate, and a younger generation marvelled at the number of public-houses on a road with little or no traffic. They wondered, too, at the fine wide thoroughfares running through the country towns. Where was the traffic? Why the extravagance of space? I suppose that as late as the year 1870 the life of the road appeared dead beyond recall, and nothing seemed more unlikely than that the coaching inn would come into favour again. The whole tendency of the time seemed to be to develop the traffic on the railway. Even walking appeared to be in danger of becoming a lost art.