On Wednesday, Sir Thomas Sutherland, the chairman of the Peninsular
and Oriental Company, delivered his inaugural New Consols (2i) were on Friday, 1011.. address as President of the Institute of Marine Engineers. His theme was the improvement in steam navigation, and he crowded his paper with curious and interesting facts and figures. The pace across the Atlantic is now twenty-five miles an hour, or six hundred miles in the twenty-four hours,—a pace 50 per cent. higher than that obtained fifteen years ago. Again, mails have been carried from Charing Cross to Bombay in thirteen days, and from Southampton to the Cape in fourteen days and a half. It would now be possible to go round the world in fifty days. The limit of speed, however, has not yet been reached, and further progress may be expected. Extra speed, strangely enough, has meant not extra risk, but extra safety. Though there are fifty thousand more persons afloat than there were fifteen years ago, the absolute loss of life at sea is less than it was in 187e. A pound of coal now does three times the amount of work it once did, and the boilers and ships are more durable.
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