Steam vessels had been in successful operation for three years before they were introduced into the mail service. In 1818, the _Rob Roy_ steam-packet plied regularly between Greenock and Belfast; in 1821, the year in which Crown packets were established, the Post-Office, or rather the Admiralty on behalf of the Post-Office, asked the help of steam. The Holyhead station for Ireland, and the Dover station for the Continent, were chosen for the experiment of mail-steamers. They were successful; and soon we find six steam-packets stationed at each place. Then we have the gradual introduction of mail contracts. The first of these commercial contracts was made in 1833, with the Mona Island Steam Company, to run steamers twice a week between Liverpool and Douglas, in the Isle of Man. Immediately after, the General Steam Navigation Company contracted to carry the Rotterdam and Hamburgh mails for 17,000_l._ a-year. In 1853 these mails were transferred to the Ostend route. The year 1839 was quite an epoch in the history of the packet service; Mr. Samuel Cunard of Halifax, Nova Scotia, having in that year contracted with the British Government for a fortnightly mail across the Atlantic, for the sum of 60,000_l._ a-year. The Cunard line of steamers is now universally known, and is unrivalled. Little more than a hundred years ago, 50,000_l._ sufficed to pay for the entire mail service of the period; about half that sum being the extent of the charges properly appertaining to the Post-Office. Then, only a few continental mails and an occasional packet to the colonies of North America and the West Indies, were all that had to be sustained; even those were kept up at a considerable loss.[167] At that time the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand were in undisputed possession of these enormous colonies; the Dutch were then the only targets for the arrows of the Caffres in South Africa; Warren Hastings and Lord Clive were children at Daylesford and Market Drayton, and little dreamt of their subsequent career in the East; while the tide of emigration which has since carried Anglo-Saxon blood and Anglo-Saxon energy into every corner of the globe had not then, to any extent, set in. That a hundred years of unequalled internal progress has developed our great empire and called into life fresh and important agencies, what reflecting mind can doubt? For many recent years the packet service of the country, traversing every known sea to keep up a connexion with those whom the exigencies of life and commerce have dispersed so widely, has cost the nation something like a million sterling per annum!