This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative, whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own past. The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its descendants lording the ocean under another flag.
The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within the past two generations for the mail communication of the two continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the time. Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe Égalité had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage, too—more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal "from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut, dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage down the Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time is less now to Japan, and about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service—far cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of the present Constitution between our own cities. Our foreign service with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution undreamed of in that day—the money-order system. Under this admirable contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security than the regular banks formerly attained.
Still in its infancy, the international money-order system has already reached importance in the magnitude of its operations. The sums sent by means of it were, in 1874, $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to Germany, and to the little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.
The dimensions to which this new method of financial intercourse between the different peoples of the globe is destined to reach may be inferred from the growth of the domestic money—order service. In 1874 the number of orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854. The erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain that this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the old routine of cheque and draft, and become, among its other advantages, a currency regulator of no trifling value.
Our post-office may almost be said to head the development of the century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical progression. Its development resembles that from the Annelids to the Vertebrata, the simple canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of the simplest animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775 from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was $37,935—little over a thousandth of what it is at present under rates of postage but a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard from each other three times a week in summer and twice in winter. Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and insisted on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through in two days each way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On the interior routes chaos ruled supreme. Newspapers and business-men combined to employ riders who meandered along the mud roads as it pleased Heaven.
When the new government machine had smoothed down its bearings matters rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903 post-offices and 20,817 miles of road. In 1820 these figures changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870 to 28,492 offices and 231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of railway, 15,788 by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented the web woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent of routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails having become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office, the locomotive variety, having been added to the old. This innovation, of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels, and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour, already furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with 40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks. These gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the mail."
The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employés of the department do not give it their whole time, many of the country postmasters being engaged in other business. But the undivided efforts of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards, and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not weight—stamps unknown. The introduction of stamps, with coincident reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years; the number of letters passing through the mails having within that period multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the British Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is now but little in excess, having been in 1874 nine hundred and sixty—seven millions. The immense difference between the two countries in extent, and consequently in the average distance of transportation, is enough to account for the contrast between the two balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual deficit, while in Great Britain this is replaced by a profit. As regards post-office progress in the United States, the question is rather an abstract one; for there is not the least probability of an advance in rates. The discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked rather by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that the former are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement in the details of service and administration.
Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the extension of the mails within the century, it is far from telling the whole story of the amplitude and celerity with which the people of our day interchange intelligence.