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

But I am anticipating. I want to tell the story of the return of the Post Office to the road, and to draw an interesting parallel between the traffic of a hundred years ago and that of to-day. The first of John Palmer's mail coaches began to run in 1784, and the system lasted nearly sixty years. The determining cause which induced the Post Office to take to the road again was the introduction of the Parcel Post. The railway company receives 55 per cent. of the stamp value of every parcel, and as the collecting, sorting, and distributing expenses are heavy, the cost of transmitting parcels in this manner is considerable. The Post Office naturally dislikes to hand over to the railway companies postage which it can economically retain in its own hands, and it was to avoid the railway charges that road services, extending to places not exceeding fifty miles or thereabouts from London, were instituted. On the 1st June 1887, the revival of the road began for the Post Office, and a parcel mail coach service was started between London and Brighton. This was the Jubilee year, and the running of the new service attracted a great deal of public attention. In a short time there were coaches running from London Bridge to Tunbridge Wells and Chatham, and from Mount Pleasant to Watford, Colchester, Hertford, Ware with branches. There was a coach to Bedford with a branch to Cambridge, another from Paddington to Oxford via Reading, and yet others to Windsor and Guildford with services to Epsom and Leatherhead. These coaches, drawn by three or four horses, were in charge of guards who carried arms; and for more than ten years the resemblance between the old and the modern mail service was striking. The difference, and of course a very notable one, was that the modern coach carried no passengers. But it carried with it all the prestige of “His Majesty's Service,” and it maintained all the old traditions of speed and punctuality— so much so that the villagers on the route set their clocks when the mail passed.