t ocean steam mail in 1833,
she has gone on rapidly increasing the same facilities, until her
noble lines of communication now extend to every land and compass
every sea. The last great contract which she conceded was last year,
to the "European and Australian Company," for carrying the mails on a
second line from Southampton _via_ Suez to Sydney, in Australia, at
L185,000, or $925,000 per year. And although her expenditures for this
service have gradually gone up to above five millions of dollars per
annum, she continues the service as a necessity to her commerce, and a
branch of facilities and accommodations with which the people of the
Kingdom will not dispense. The British Government set out with the
determination to have the advantages of the system, whether it would
pay or not. They believed that the system would eventually become
self-supporting, by reason of the many important improvements then
proposed in the steam-engine, and they have ever since professed to
believe the same thing. But their experience points quite the other
way; and while the service is daily becoming more important to them in
every sense, it is also becoming year by year more expensive.

Contracts which the Admiralty made with several large and prominent
companies in 1838 they renewed at the same or increased subsidies,
after twelve years' operations, in 1850, for another term of twelve
years. And so far from those companies with their many ships on hand
being able to undertake the service for less, they demanded more in
almost every case, and received it from the government. The
improvements which they anticipated in the marine engine were more
than counterbalanced by the rise in the price of fuel and wages all
over the kingdom and the world. In fact, those improvements have been
very few and very small. It still takes nearly as much coal to
evaporate a pound of water as it then did; and the improvements which
have been made were generally patents, and costly in the prime cost of
construction to a degree almost preclusive of increased benefits to
the general service. At any rate, the latest steam adaptations and
improvements have proven unequal to the end proposed, and the cost of
the ocean service is now far heavier than it ever has been before,
simply because of the greater speed required by the public for the
mails and passage.

It had long been hoped that this difficulty of increasing cost in
running ocean steamers might finally be o