Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean PostRainey, Thomas
History
Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post
Rainey, Thomas
Mail steamers; Steam-navigation
There are many considerations which affect this question. The ordinary
average passages of the ocean on long voyages are now very rapid; and
some of the clippers have attained a speed which no freighting steamer
may ever be expected to do on the high seas. They do not maintain this
high speed as an average, but it is sufficiently high for all of the
ordinary purposes of transport in the standard articles of commerce,
and where the business of the clipper is done by a fast mail steamer.
There is no positive necessity for the speedy transport that some have
attempted to give to articles, whose presence in the markets, as the
ordinary supplies of life, to-day, next month, or a month later, is a
matter of total indifference to every one except the ship-owner
himself. It but little concerns the public whether a cargo of cotton,
or beef or pork, or corn is one month or forty-five days between the
United States and England, so that it is safe in the end. It is an
annual production that must have an annual transit, and however
unnecessarily fast we may become, we can not send more than one crop
in the year. The world frequently becomes too fast in every thing; and
crises, panics, and bankruptcies follow as legitimate consequences.
When a fictitious value is given to every thing, and every globule of
air which one has breathed comes puffing out, a splendid bubble, a
magnificent speculation, and when men have to go so fast that they
need a telegraph to ride them through the world lest they get behind
the heated times, no wonder that the shipper can not sit quietly down
in his office and wait thirty days for a load of corn to reach
England, or a load of iron to appear in the harbor in return. And it
does not matter to him that it may not be used there in six months. He
wishes to finish the "operation," to close up the "transaction" before
he goes up town in the evening.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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