It is pleasing and instructive to examine the steam mail service of Great Britain, and see the gradual, unfaltering progress that she has made from year to year, since 1833; increasing the mail facilities and the sums paid for them by constant accretion based on system, rather than by any spasmodic legislation, or the ruling caprices of the moment. These improvements have not come all in a mass, or in any one year. Neither have they been abandoned at times of financial embarrassment, or commercial depression. At such periods they have been as regularly fostered as in the times of the most flush prosperity; and have ever been properly considered one of the prime agents and necessities for restoring commerce to its normal condition and a safe equilibrium. The transmarine service, which cost but L583,793, or $2,918,965, per annum until 1850,[G] now costs L1,062,797, or $5,333,985; within a fraction of double the sum. While the increase has not been slow, it has been steady and systematic, just as it was necessary to meet the wants of British commerce throughout the world. The language of the Hon. Senator Rusk on this subject, in his Report made to the Senate, Sep. 18th, 1850, found in Senate Ex. Doc. No. 50, 1st Session of 32d Congress, in Special Rep. Secretary of the Navy, 1852, is forcible and worthy of remembrance. He says: [G] See Second Report, Steam Communication with India, 1851. Appendix, page 419. "The importance of the steam mail service, when considered with reference to the convenience which it affords to the social intercourse of the country, is as nothing when compared with its vast bearing upon the commerce of the world. Wherever facilities of rapid travel exist, trade will be found with its attendant wealth. Of the truth of this proposition, no country, perhaps, affords a more forcible illustration than Great Britain, as none has ever availed itself, to so great an extent, of the benefits of easy and rapid intercommunication between the various portions of her almost boundless empire. The commercial history of England has shown that mail facilities have uniformly gone hand in hand with the extension of trade; and wherever British subjects are found forming communities, there do we find the hand of the government busy in supplying the means of easy and safe communication with the mother country. With a view to this, we have beheld England increasing her steam marine at an enormous expense, and sustaining packet lines connecting with every quarter of the globe, even in cases where any _immediate_ and _direct_ remuneration was out of the question. The great object in view was, to draw together the portions of an empire upon which the sun never sets, and the martial airs of which encircle the globe, and to make British subjects who dwell in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and even Oceanica, all feel alike that they are Britons."