CUNARD LINE. 



16. Great as the progress of steam-navigation has been within 

 the last quarter of a century, much still remains to be accom- 

 plished, before that vast agent of transport can be regarded as 

 having been pushed to the limit of its powers. Its superior speed, 

 regularity, and certainty, comparatively with sailing-vessels, have 

 naturally first attracted to it passengers, despatches, and certain 

 descriptions of merchandise to which expedition is important, and 

 which can bear a high rate of freight. The mechanical conditions 

 which ensure expedition in long voyages, exclude, to a great 

 extent, the transport of general merchandise ; for a large part of 

 the tonnage of the vessel is occupied by the machinery and fuel. 

 The heavy expenses, therefore, of the construction and mainte- 

 nance of these vessels, must be defrayed by appropriating the 

 profitable tonnage to those objects of transport alone which will 

 bring the highest rate of freight. While the steamer, therefore, 

 has allured from the sailing-vessel the chief part of the passenger 

 traffic, the mails altogether, parcels, and some few objects of 

 general traffic, the latter still continues in undisturbed possession 

 of the transport business of general commerce. 



The next step in the improvement of the art must therefore be 

 directed to the construction of another class of steam- vessels, 

 which shall bear to the present steam-ships the same relation 

 which the goods-trains, on the railway, bear to the passenger- 

 trains. As in the case of these goods-trains, expedition must be 

 sacrificed to reduce the cost of transport to the limit which shall 

 enable the merchandise to bear the freight. If the steamer for 

 the general purposes of commerce can be made to exceed the 

 sailing-vessel, in anything approaching to the ratio by which the 

 goods-train on the railway exceeds the waggon or canal-boat, we 

 shall soon see the ocean covered with such steamers, and the 

 sailing-vessel will pass from the hands of the merchant to those 

 of the historian. 



17. To render steamers capable of attaining these ends, it will 

 be evidently advisable to adopt measures, to combine the qualities 

 of a sailing-vessel with those of a steamer. The ships must 

 possess such steaming power as may give them that increased 

 expedition, regularity, and punctuality, which, in the existing 

 state of the arts, can only be obtained through that agency ; but 

 it is also important that they should accomplish this without 

 robbing them, to any injurious extent, of their present capability 

 of satisfying the wants of commerce. 



18. 'In an early edition of my treatise on the Steam-Engine, 

 published long before screw steam-vessels had attained the state 

 of perfection to which they have now arrived, I stated that no ex- 

 pedient was more likely to accomplish this, than one which would 



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