senior partner to retire, comfortably. The
total sum lost in interest by the entire
commercial community would make my tube. I
have calculated it carefully at per vertical
mile. Well, then, I say something ought to
be done.

When I first began to go to Australia,
in eighteen hundred and fifty-two, it was
not so bad. You could go by screw-ships,
viâ the Cape. To be sure, they all broke
down, or went ashore, or never got to
Melbourne; and our firm told the authorities that
they would break down, or go ashore, and
never get there. But it was an experiment
and it showed attention on the part of the
Lords of the Treasury. You could also go—
and that was the way our firm sent me—by the
Peninsular and Oriental Company's route.
It was zig-zag, which is nearly as bad as
all round about; but it was fast. You rushed
to Marseilles, and caught a boat there. You
rushed across the Isthmus of Suez, and caught
a boat there. You got to Point de Galle, and
caught a boat there; and, if you were lucky
in hitting the boats, you got to Melbourne in
about seven weeks after leaving London.
The boats between Point de Galle and
Melbourne were nothing to speak of. They were
little, and overcrowded, and dirty, and slow;
but, then, it was only a colony that you were
going to, and the Peninsular and Oriental
Company, having taken the contract at a low
rate in order to keep rivals out of their
waters, were not likely to ruin their share-
holders. But what happened? When the
war broke out, our firm said to me, "We
must make new arrangements with our
branch at Sydney; you must be off there
to-night."

I went to the Peninsular and Oriental
Company, and asked about the berths from
Point de Galle. "Dropped that service," said
the clerk. No boat from Point de Galle! The
fact is, the Peninsular and Oriental had given
up several of their boats to the Government
for the conveyance of troops to the Crimea;
and they had convinced the Lords of the
Treasury that the Point de Galle screws must stop
running. Just then, our firm was doing a
tremendous business with Australia; yet my
Lords managed to keep up steam postal
service to India, Brazil, Spain, West Indies;
places that did not take one-sixth part of the
value of the goods that were pouring into
Austialia: but they left Australia nearly
destitute. Our firm and several other firms
remonstrated, but my Lords had made up their
minds; and, during the seventeen mouths that
have elapsed since the Peninsular and Oriental
got off their Point de Galle contract, I and
others have had to go round the world, and
to go in sailing ships. Capital clippers, the
Liverpool clippers, but they take eighty to one
hundred days in going, and not very much
less in coming. Now, why, as a colony
increases, should you diminish the facilities of
getting to it, the war notwithstanding? I
would be much obliged if my Lords would
answer that.

But my Lords are going to do something,
now that there is Peace. They have issued a
minute, in which they are good enough to
tell us commercial men, that there are
three ways of getting to Australia; viâ the
Cape; viâ Suez; and viâ Panama; and—with
great modesty, declining to pronounce any
opinion of their own, as to which is best—
they ask the six Australian colonies to
consider and agree which route shall be
adopted. They invite steam-ship companies to
tender for all the routes. This is no doubt
believed to be very energetic; but, all the
while that the six colonies are wrangling—as
they are sure to do—I shall still have to go
by the clippers; for it will be at least a year
before anything can be settled. Our firm
says, "Put on the Point de Galle boats
again." But the Lords of the Treasury are
not going to prejudge the question in that
way. Other firms say, that if the Official
Hydrographer (a person who would rather
puzzle you in an argument, I should think)
be set to calculate, he would very soon find
out which is the shortest route—commercial
men generally regarding the shortest route
as the best route. They say, that if you draw
a line from London to Melbourne it will go by
Dover, Paris, Marseilles, Suez, the Chagos
Islands, across the Indian Ocean, right into
Broad Street, Melbourne; that there are
railways, steamers, and caravans into Suez:
and that all that has to be done is to put
ten-knot steamers on between Suez and
Melbourne. This would land letters between
London and Melbourne in forty-four days.
But my Lords say, that although this is very
true,the form must be gone through of waiting
a year or so until the colonies have
fought out the battle of routes.

I say—Make the tube; or, if you will not
go to that expense, cut as straight across the
globe as you can; and, for mercy's sake, get
the circumnavigating discussion out of the
Circumlocution Office as fast as possible.

FURTHER TRAVELS IN SEARCH OF
BEEF.

I HAD been recounting my want of success
in pursuit of beef in Paris, and my deplorable
break-down at His Lordship's Larder
there,* to my friend Lobb; (informing him,
also, in justice to the original establishment
in Cheapside, London, that it is now
revived, and in full cut of some three thousand
dinners per week); and he, a renowned
beefeater, as well as an able financier, appeared
considerably interested in my narrative. Lobb
is a man of few words, and not emotional; yet
he was good enough to say, on this occasion,
that he sympathised with me, and would
put me in the way of procuring good beef
shortly. We were conversing soon afterwards

* See page 49 of the present volume.