Page:Victoria, with a description of its principal cities, Melbourne and Geelong.djvu/211

 "STEAM POSTAL COMMUNICATION WITH AUSTRALIA.

"Now that we have done with the Russian war, we may begin to turn our attention to a few domestic matters which require immediate arrangement. When the exigencies of the war were at the highest, it was natural enough that secondary subjects, such as postal communication between the mother country and its various colonies, should be dismissed from consideration until a fitter opportunity. The one problem which required instant solution was the transport of troops, provisions, and materiel from the English ports to Balaklava. Every steamer upon which the Government could lay its hands was pressed into the service. There was no time for inquiring too nicely into details. The first point was to secure the ships; the second, to inquire what inconvenience might be inflicted upon commerce, what arrangements might be dislocated by the abstraction of packets from their ordinary functions. We would premise by saying that our object just now is prospective, not retrospective. We do not ask whether the transport service might not have been equally well effected without rupture of our communication with Australia; but, now that the war is at an end, and communication is about to be restored, which is the preferable route? In the interval which elapsed between the failure of the experiment by the Cape of Good Hope and the