7 APRIL 1877, Page 3

The institutions of cheap postage and of electric telegraphs must

be very questionable blessings to distinguished personages, in a country so domestic and so fond of homely felicitations as• Germany. We are assured by the Times' correspondent at Berlin, that the Emperor, on the eightieth anniversary of his birthday, received 1,858 congratulatory telegrams, and nearly 3,000 congra- tulatory letters—say 4,800 congratulations in all—which, even at the rate of opening and disposing of one per minute, it must have taken just eighty hours merely to peruse, an hour for every year of his life. At this rate the Emperor will have to make felicitation a misdemeanour, or at least to pass a Falk law against the promulgation, without the sanction of the State, of a sentence of congratulation.