"There are no less than thirty steamships now running between New York and different ports in Europe. These are regular steamers carrying passengers and merchandise, beside which _there are a number of transient ones that carry cargo only_. But ten of them are American vessels, while the Boston, Portland, and Philadelphia lines are entirely European. _The Atlantic trade is departing from us_, and unless our shipping merchants exhibit more practical wisdom and enterprise _they will ultimately be vanished in this contest_. The whole number of steamships engaged upon the routes between Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Halifax, and Quebec, on this side of the Atlantic and the ports of Havre, Bremen, Hamburg, Southampton, London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, on the other side, is fifty-one. Of these only seventeen have paddle-wheels: all the others--thirty-four--are _screw propellers with iron hulls_. They are the most economical of steamships; their steam power is but small in proportion to their tonnage; they make very regular and quick passages, carry large cargoes, charge but little more freight than sailing vessels, and _merchants prefer them for carrying goods_. _These_ are the steamers that are fast 'routing out' our sailing craft in the Atlantic trade." Of the foreign ships mentioned above, only the _Cunard_ received a subsidy. That was in 1857. On March 31, 1860, the _Scientific American_ again referred to the subject:-- "Three years ago we directed attention to the great increase of foreign screw steamers, and showed clearly how they were rapidly taking away the trade that had been formerly carried by American ships.... Our merchants did not heed this injunction, and, as a consequence, their rivals have grown stronger, while they have become weaker. To-day nearly all the mail and passenger, besides a great deal of the goods, traffic, is carried by foreign ships, _the great majority of which are iron screw steamers_. These facts are indisputable; how can we account for them but upon the theory that iron screw steamers are the cheapest and best for the traffic?... We exhort our shipping merchants to examine the question candidly for themselves, ... for we assure them that 'the Philistines are upon them!' We have not a single new Atlantic steamship on the stocks, from one end of the country to the other, while in Great Britain there are 16,000 tons of new iron screw steamers building for the American trade." It was in those days that the "New York interests," as Mr. Cramp says, "carried with them the ship-owners, ship-builders, shipping men, mariners, and all others in general," while they sneered at the screw propeller. Other quotations to show how and why the British secured supremacy are worth making. Said the _Nautical Magazine_ (New York) for February, 1856, regarding two steamers that had been compared in all particulars:--