Now, there can be no doubt that the Collins line of steamers did honour to the naval architecture of the time, and in their performances equalled the expectations of their most sanguine friends. Mr. C. B. Stuart, with feelings of national pride, places upon record that, in May 1851, the _Pacific_ accomplished the passage from New York to Liverpool in nine days, twenty hours, and sixteen minutes, and that, in July 1852, the _Arctic_ made the same passage in nine days, seventeen hours, and twelve minutes, which considerably exceeded in swiftness any voyages hitherto made across the ocean by the vessels of any nation. But while this determination to surpass every other vessel afloat is one which commends itself to our admiration, if not to our better judgment (as speed unless it is combined with safety should always be condemned), it was attended with enormous extra outlay, for, by a statement afterwards laid before Congress, it appeared “that to effect a saving of a day or a day and a half in the run between New York and Liverpool costs the company nearly a million of dollars annually.”[202] So eager, however, are the public to make rapid passages (and this applies to railways as well as ships) that the Collins line for the time had a decided preference with passengers.[203] Nor was there any lack of valuable goods; the gross earnings of the company by freights and passage money alone amounting in the two first years to $1,979,760. But while the Government during these two years paid the Collins line for mail service $770,000, they only recovered $513,546, showing a pecuniary loss of $256,453, so that, so far as the public was concerned, the establishment of the Collins line of steamers can only be regarded as a costly and doubtful experiment; and, as will hereafter be shown, the establishment and maintenance of a costly Transatlantic line was not merely an equivocal success on the whole, but to the shareholders resulted in a vast loss of capital. [Sidenote: Great competition, 1850-1852.] The owners of the Cunard steamers were, however, not listless spectators of the great preparations which the Americans were making to run them off their ocean lines, and, in 1850, they added two new vessels to their fleet, the _Asia_ and _Africa_; they were sister ships[204] but, though magnificent vessels, they were not equal in speed to those which the Collins Company had sent forth.