Mr. Henniker Heaton, M.P., has been urging the Post Office
to hold out hopes that if a powerful steamship company should offer to carry letters to Australia by long sea,—without con- ditions such as we now impose as to the time of the delivery,—for a penny apiece, but with a fixed minimum to be paid by the Post Office in case the number of letters should not be large enough to remunerate them, the Post Office would consider the suggestion. The Post Office do not hold out any encouragement to suppose that they would seriously consider such an offer,—we suppose because they regard speed as very important, and because it would be impossible to find sufficient money to pay for speed if the greater number of letters went by a slower route at a much cheaper rate. The real difficulty is, we imagine, that extra postage for speed would so seldom be paid, that we should lose all our fast lines of mails by diverting the main stream of letters to a slow and cheap line.
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