vidual enterprise is allowed to perform such
portions of the business of the Government as it may find for
its advantage, the Government will soon be left to perform
unprofitable portions of it only, and must be driven to
abandon it entirely or carry it on at a heavy tax upon the
public Treasury.... I may further add that the Department
created under the Constitution and designed to exercise
exclusive power for the transmission of intelligence, must
necessarily be superseded in much of its most important
business if the telegraph be permitted to remain under the
control of individuals" (Reps. of 1845 and 1846).

Postmaster-General Cresswell said in 1872: "If the effects of
rivalry between the telegraph and the mail upon the revenues
of the post office have not been serious, it is due alone to
the liberal management of the latter as compared with that of
the companies, a management which since the invention of the
telegraph has reduced the rates of postage from 25 to 3 cents,
and increased tenfold the correspondence of the country" (Rep.
1872, pp. 22-3).

One of Hannibal Hamlin's three great reasons for a postal
telegraph was "for the sake of the post-office system, which
may at any time be depleted by a strong telegraph in private
hands" (_Cong. Globe_, 42-2, p. 3554).

In times of pestilence the telegraph will save the post office from
embargo. A letter from Port Gibson, Miss., says:

Whenever the yellow fever breaks out at any point, all cities and
towns, and some counties, having communication with the infected
districts, at once declare a rigid quarantine. The effect of this
is to cut off all communication between themselves and the outside
world. Trains and boats are prevented from receiving or delivering
the mails. Business men are unable to communicate by letter with
their correspondents, and all are prevented from hearing from
relatives and friends in the quarantined places, except by
telegraph, whose rates prevent many from using the wires.[5]

[5] Wan. Arg. p. 138.

The infection does not travel on an electric wire, and if the post
office possessed the telegraph, its business would go smoothly on in
spite of the plague, instead of bei