THE MAIL SERVICE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2218, 5 April 1881, Page 3

THE MAIL SERVICE.

Mr F. H. Troup, in a letter to the Auckland “ Star ” lately on the rival mail services, aaja:—"lt ia well known that the San Francisco line has not fulfilled the expectations held out by it through its parent, Sir Julius Vogel, and the Ouatom House Paul Prya still bar the way to an interchange of goods between New Zealand and America. But perhaps it is best that it should be so, because the public will now see clearly the fallacy of subsidising a purely mail line without securing any of the advantages offered by the boats as carrying agents also, as is now being so successfully demon strated by the P. ond O. and Orient lines, not to add the new Queensland mail service about to be started here. After a powerful steamer has once got clear from the loading cranes she can travel just as fast as a heavilysubsidised one carrying only a few awfully select passengers and some boxes of gold with the mails. Until the Panama Canal route is opened I would suggest to New Zealand the advisability of terminating the expensive and (commercially speaking) useless Ban Francisco lino as soon as possible, and go in for a first class lino via Suez Canal and the Cape ; the boats to start from Auckland, calling at Wellington, Port Lyttelton, and Port Chalmers. This line would carry mails, passengers, and frozen meat, &c., Home—and mails, passengers, and general freight ou . Let the Union Steamship Company and the New Zealand Shipping Company amalgamate and form one powerful steamship company, of which New Zealand and the whole of Australia would bo proud. Why let our carrying trade drift into English hands, as the American trade has done ?”