The Globe. SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1874.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 30, 4 July 1874, Page 2

The Globe. SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1874.

We suppose it is useless to expect punctuality in the delivery of the mails from San Francisco. Of the boats at present employed in the service, the Mikado loses fifty-one honrs in Bteaming from Honolulu down, and has to spend the last three days, before arriving in Auckland, in repairing leaky tubes. The Macgregor manages to get on the reef at the entrance to the harbor at Kandavu, the Cyphrenes is admittedly slow, and of the remaining boats, one that is undoubtedly very fast, is reported in a private letter from a well-known resident in Christchurch, who made the passage to Kandavu in her, to be in a very bad state of discipline. The March mails via San Francisco were delivered in London on May 4tb, being then three days overdue —and there has hardly been one mail delivered, either in England or New Zealand, that has arrived at the proper time. Our English letters and papers were delivered on Thursday afternoon, and the same evening we heard of the arrival of the Suez mail, on board the Albion, at the Bluff. This mail will probably arrive this afternoon, or at the latest on Sunday morning, and will bring us letters or papers sent via Brindisi to May 15th. The case therefore stands thus:— San Francisco mail left on May sth and was due at Port Lyttelton on June 24th; she arrived at Port Lyttelton on July 2nd, or, say eight days overdue. The Suez mail left Brindisi on May 15th, and was due at Port Lyttelton July 7th; she will most probably arrive at Port Lyttelton on the 4th, or let us say sth to be on the safe side; but even then she will be two days before her time. In fact, the Suez mail arrives three days later than that delivered from San Francisco, and brings ten days later news, being a clear gain of seven days in the passage from England to New Zealand. Now, with all the interest and pressure that is brought to bear in favour of the San Francisco service, it is a matter of perfect certainty, that merchants, and men of business generally, will use the line which is both the quickest and the most certain, for all their important correspondence. And this being the case, we venture to say that, until the San Francisco service is brought into much better order than it is at present, most of this correspondence will go by the Suez Eoute. The attempt to conduct a large service with rotten old wooden paddlewheel steamers, with their old-fashioned and exploded beam engines, came to grief; and the service as at present conducted, w r ith boats, that however good they may be of the sort, are by no means properly fitted up for the conveyance of passengers, will most assuredly earn for itself a bad name that it will take years of trouble to remove.