From which deduct proportion of passage-money for the public account, estimated not to exceed 3,000 ------- Net cost of the Service £44,912 ======= It hence appears that this Service, which cost, in the defective state of its arrangements, and as carried on by small vessels of about 140-horse power, £44,912, was undertaken, and has since been satisfactorily performed, under a greatly improved arrangement, by large vessels of 450-horse power, for £34,200, realising a financial saving of about £10,700 per annum to the country. No. III. _Contract for conveying Mails between Suez and Aden, Ceylon, Madras, Calcutta, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong._ COMMENCED JANUARY 1ST, 1845. For several years prior to the arrangement of the Contract with this Company, for the accelerated transmission of the India Mails to and from Alexandria, much public solicitude had been manifested for a more comprehensive system of steam communication with India than that which had been established by the Government and the East India Company. That establishment being considered, as, indeed, at its commencement it was professed to be, merely a preliminary and experimental one--intended to pave the way for a more comprehensive scheme, that should embrace all the Presidencies, and not be limited to the port of Bombay only, as the Government and East India Line was,--and which it was expected private enterprise would undertake, after the navigation of the Red Sea, and other important questions connected with such an undertaking, had been tested by the Imperial and Indian Governments. As a proof of the importance which was attached to this extension of steam communication with British India, the following declarations of eminent persons connected with the Government of that empire may be quoted:-- The late Lord William Bentinck, then Governor-General of India, stated, in a public despatch, that so great were the advantages which it would confer, “that it would be cheaply purchased at any price.” The present Right Honourable President of the India Board, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, who then filed the same post, in speaking in the House of Commons of various ameliorations which the Government he was then connected with had in view for India, in which improved steam communication formed an item, said, that “it was calculated to benefit India to an extent beyond the power of the most ardent imagination to conceive.” And the present Lord Bishop of Calcutta, in a public address at a meeting in that city, said, that “the extension of steam navigation with India would be opening the floodgates of measureless blessings to mankind.”