loss of life, and would rather see even millions devoted to the construction of _strong steamers_, than witness the sudden and heart-rending ruptures of the dearest ties of our nature, caused by the accidents that so frequently occur. Such is their feeling of stern disapprobation of the reckless indifference respecting the safety of passengers, daily manifested by some of the proprietors and officers of steam lines, that they are resolved, so far at least as they are concerned, not in any way to countenance, directly or indirectly, such a course of proceeding. In the extension of the system of ocean mail transportation which they propose to recommend, care will be taken, that the steamers which carry the Government mails shall be regarded as national ships, to a certain extent, and as such, under the charge of the law-making power, and be so built as to secure safety to travellers; and that, in all contracts, this consideration shall be regarded as one of paramount importance." Regarding a few sailing-ship owners in New-York and Boston, who had memorialized Congress against the Collins and other lines, the Report says: "The memorialists are loud in their complaints respecting the alleged improper interference of the Government with matters that should be left, as they say, entirely to individual enterprise, which in their opinion becomes paralyzed under the effects of Government patronage bestowed upon some to the exclusion of others. If the authors of this memorial will take a fair and dispassionate view of the matter, they will, as your Committee think, be convinced that they are wrong in their supposition, and that the Government has not gratuitously meddled in concerns with which it should have nothing to do. The merchants and ship-owners referred to seem to forget, in the first place, that the system of ocean steam mail navigation is intended to secure adequate protection for our commerce from foreign aggression in the event of war; and in the second, that it was instituted at a moment when the fine packet ships, to which the memorialists refer with such becoming pride, had in fact been driven from the ocean to a certain extent by the overwhelming power of a British mail steam line, sustained by the British Government, which had monopolized ocean mail and passenger steam transportation, as well as the freights of lighter and more perishable descriptions of merchandise. If, as these gentlemen have stated, the sailing ships have been made to succumb, it has been under the force of an agency more certain and not less powerful than the one named by them--wielded by foreign capitalists and directed by a foreign government claiming for itself the supremacy of the ocean. The Cunard line of ocean steamers had been in possession of a monopoly