EXTENT OF MAIL ROUTES. 481 ending 1843, amounted to 4,514,865 dollars; the revenue for the same period, to a sum of 4,412,237, leaving a deficit in each year, of 102,628 dollars. By a report of the mail service of the United States, for the year ending the 1st of July, 1843, as stated by the first assistant Post-master General, it appears, that the length of routes travelled was 142,295 miles ;-that the annual transportation by horse and sulky, (an appropriate name for a very unsociable description of one-horse conveyance, of exceedingly light construction, made to carry one person only, and in very general use in the United States) was 11,146,229 miles, at a cost of 602,064 dollars; by stage and coach conveyance, 18,414,174 miles, at a cost of 1,611,568 dollars; and by railroad and steam-boat 5,692,402 miles, at a cost of 733,687 dollars; making a total annual transportation of 35,252,805 miles, at a cost, or outlay, of 2,947,319 dollars. The whole number of free letters heretofore sent through the post office, is estimated at 3,000,000 annually. Notwithstanding the efforts made by the government to establish a general system of post office arrangement throughout the Republic, and which the foregoing returns so fully bespeak, there is no other department of the public administration that has given so little of satisfaction, and against which the popular feeling has been more generally excited; not because of its acknowledged subserviency, or the political and party uses to VOL. I. 2 I which it has been applied, but of its asserted insufficiency in securing a more regular and efficient transmission of the correspondence of the country, than has hitherto been the case; without taking into account, the varied difficulties that the department has had to encounter in its ill-requited efforts to this end. "A public service," remarks the honorable the Post-master General, in his annual report to Congress, December 3rd, 1842, "which requires the agency of 13,733 post-masters, and their clerks, 2,343 contractors and their agents, covering during the year 34,835,991 miles of transportation, and extending almost to the door of every citizen, must encounter difficulties, and be subject to occasional irregularities, not only from the neglect of some of its numerous agents, but from physical causes not in the power of this department to overcome. "When the vast machinery of the General Post Office, the minuteness of its details, and the character of the majority of the roads over which the mail is transported, are contemplated, there should be more astonishment at the general regularity of the service, than of surprise and discontent at occasional failures. Absolute certainty and unbroken regularity in the arrival and departure of the mails at all times, cannot, and ought not to be expected." These considerations, however reasonable and just they may have been, were insufficient to satisfy the public mind, or to allay the discontent, that frequent disappointment in the transmission of the public correspondence occasioned. Private ex ESTABLISHENT OF PRIVATE MAILS. 483 presses for the conveyance of letters, were established in 1843, and '44, throughout all the principal cities on the seaboard, and a direct postal communication, carried on by private companies, that superseded the accustomed duties of this department, and which is generally exceeded in the despatch with which its daily transmissions of letters were conducted as well as outbid in the reduced postage for which they were conveyed. The "American Letter Mail Company," established by private undertaking in New York, carried their letters by daily express at the following rates, viz. :— These expresses, conducted with all the publicity and exactness of the Post Office department, were not only in opposition to the views of the general Government, but directly aimed at its supremacy, and would appear to have been established in direct violation of the law, under the Federal compact subsisting between these states, that if not infringed in its positive legal interpretation, was certainly contravened in its intent and implied meaning, by these proceedings. The 8th section of the 1st Article of the Constitution, in relation to this subject, declares, “Congress shall have power to establish post offices and post roads." It will scarcely be supposed, that the authority thus vested in the general Government, was intended to restrict it to the mere constructing of post roads, to be afterwards travelled by private companies, employed in the conveyance of public mails, but that it should assume to itself the duties and responsibilities of this arduous and important trust, for the general welfare, to the exclusion of every other, or private authority whatsoever. This very obvious intendment of the framers of the Constitution, which has been so fully acquiesced in by the entire people, up to a very recent period, may possibly have occasioned their leaving a question of this material consequence, subject to the slightest legal misrepresentation, or the possibility of any future advantage being taken of its insufficiency, to carry out by its actual, or specific wording, the very ample and exclusive powers it was very evidently intended to confer. But as the direct and positive signification, and not its spirit or context, is the controlling guide in directing the citizens of these states in its due and proper observance, we consequently find advantage being taken of a constrained interpretation of this clause in the Federal Constitution, to supersede the functions of Government in this very necessary part of their most important trusts, by the numerous parties who allied themselves together for this purpose, to the great detriment and loss of revenue to this department. They contended, that though Congress may have possessed, under the Federal compact, a direct power to establish "post offices and post roads," and even REGARDING PRIVATE MAILS. 485 an implied authority to convey letters and parcels throughout the Republic,-that, nevertheless, there existed no authoritative, or restrictive law prohibiting individuals, or companies, from exercising this right, more especially by steam-boat and railroad travel, modes of conveyance that were not contemplated by the framers of the Constitution; and that the Federal law, even in its opposite and forced construction, could never recognize the privilege, as assured to the general Government in an unequal and unjust monopoly, to the exclusion of the general public, or citizens of these states. This question, distinguished as it has been, not only by its great commercial importance, but from its exceeding novelty in the internal legislation of modern governments, was brought to an issue in the latter part of the year 1843, by the institution of legal proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States, for the southern district of New York, at the suit of the United States, against the commercial firm of Adams and Co., of that city, for an alleged infraction of the Federal law, in assuming the public conveyance of letters and parcels for hire, and which it was contended, was restricted to the general Government of the country, under the Constitution. These proceedings, after a lengthened investigation, resulted in a verdict for the defendants. A further attempt to establish the exclusive right contended for by the Government, was made at Boston, in the month of June following, by the in |