i6 STAGE-COACH AND MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE 



irrosponsible men who could not be held to 

 tlieir undertakings. In some few instances 

 ordinary night-stages were given the business, 

 and it was seriously proposed to employ the 

 guards of existing stage-coaches to take charge 

 of the bags, l)ut this was never carried out. In 

 the midst of all these worries, when it seemed as 

 though the desjoatch of the mails must needs, in 

 the altered conditions of the time, be eventually 

 changed from night to day, railways came to 

 relieve official anxieties, which existed not only 

 on account of the increasing cost, but also on the 

 score of the continually growing bulk of mail- 

 matter, 2^iled up to mountainous heights on the 

 roof, instead of, as originally, l)eing easily stowed 

 away in tlie depths of the hind boot. It was 

 considered a great advantage of the mail-coaches 

 built by Waude in these last days that they Avere 

 not only built with a low centre of gravity, but 

 that, with a dropped hind axle, they made a 

 deeper and more capacious boot possible, in which 

 were stowed the more valuable j)ortions of the 

 mail. Had railways not at the very cynthia of 

 the moment come to supply a "felt Avant," cer- 

 tainly the mails must on many roads have been 

 carried by mail-vans devoted exclusively to the 

 service. J5ut in 1830 the Liverpool and Man- 

 chester Railway carried mailbags, and in antici- 

 2)ati()n of the opening tliroughoiit of the London 

 and Eirmingham, the lirst long route, in Sejitember 

 1838, an Act of Parliament was passed on 

 August lltli in that year, authorising the 



