Page:Motors and motor-driving (1902).djvu/63

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THE UTILITY OF MOTOR VEHICLES
37

them for mails, there are still provincial towns near London to which a seedy pair of horses and a broken-down-looking driver convey His Majesty's mail every day or night. We have no chance at present of seeing a saving of time in the matter of the rural postmen or the provincial mail-cart. Why should there not, for instance, be a late motor-mail service from London, leaving about two a.m. after all the main-line railway services have ceased, to convey letters, perhaps posted with a late-fee stamp, up to midnight for the country, and deliverable in towns within a hundred miles of London by the first post next morning? I am confident that were an experiment of this kind started the number of letters so posted would very soon make the demand for motor-cars a very large one on behalf of the Post Office, and the convenience to the public would be undoubted. From eight o'clock in the evening until eight o'clock the next morning you cannot telegraph to most country towns, and after eight o'clock, unless you send to the mail train at the terminus, correspondence by letter is impossible. There must be thousands of people every night in London, and in every provincial centre, who would gladly pay an extra penny, or even twopence, if they knew that by so doing a letter would be delivered next morning by the ordinary first post. A motor-car also enables one to send a written message to a telephone station night or day.

That the motor-car has come to stay is a commonplace, but few can foresee what a change it will make in our economic, political, and social life. I believe that the revolution worked by railways is a small thing compared with the revolution to be produced by the motor-car.