72 The American Mail Service. 



Cunard steamers from Liverpool and New York, and while that 

 state of things prevailed not in a single instance did Saturday's 

 letters from New York arrive at Southampton in sufficiently 

 good time the following Saturday to allow even the Southampton 

 people to reply to their own letters by the outgoing steamer on 

 the following Saturday, and when the inhabitants of South- 

 ampton itself were unable to do that, what could be said of the 

 people in the rest of the kingdom ? All that was immensely in 

 favour of the Queenstown route. On a Saturday evening during 

 the past summer, when he was at Southampton, the City of 

 Paris arrived at the docks at 5.30, and the letters conveyed by 

 her reached London at 9.30 the same night, even after the night 

 mail trains had left for the North. The first question the 

 American passengers asked was, " What about the Campania ?" 

 which was to leave New York half an hour after their vessel 

 had left, and they were thoroughly disgusted when they were 

 informed that the Campania had landed her mails at 9.30 on 

 the previous Friday morning at Queenstown, and that the 

 letters had been delivered throughout the kingdom on Saturday 

 morning, whereas those brought by the Southampton route 

 were not delivered until the Monday morning. He mentioned 

 that fact to show that, although there had been a good deal of 

 talk about improving the local service between Queenstown and 

 London — and he believed that it should be improved to the 

 utmost extent that the most modern engineering inventions 

 would permit — yet the superiority of the Queenstown route 

 was not dependent upon any such improvements, for at the 

 present moment it was infinitely superior as far as the delivery 

 of the letters throughout the whole of the United Kingdom was 

 concerned. The President of the Liverpool Chamber of 

 Commerce, Mr. M'Arthur, recently said, as far as Liverpool was 

 concerned, the adoption of Southampton in preference to 

 Queenstown would mean that they in Liverpool would have to 

 post their American letters twenty-four hours earlier, and that 

 they would receive their American correspondence ten and a 

 half hours later. That was a very serious difference, and when 



