Tue mail steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company are to leave this at daylight on Tuesdays during the South-west monsoon, Except Sundays this is about as incon venient a day as the company could have chosen. It will cause a great deal of work on Sundays and a hurry to get cargo. on board aad slipping and other documents ready on Monday. We were in hopes that the P. & 0, Company would arrange that their mail steamers should leave this on Saturday morning all the year round, and with the accelerated speed which the company is to give wider the new contract, such an arrangement would be easily carried out. The public expected that this would be done, and the readiness with which the Directors of the Company met the wishes of the community by changing the day of departure of their steamers during the remainder of the North-east monsoon strengthened this expectation. The announcement that the P. & O. steamers are to leave on Tuesday mornings has been received with great dissatisfaction, and if the Directors persist in this arrangement they will do an amount of baun to their company in this part of the world which may be irremediable, Such impolicy would be playing into the hands of most formidable rival, the German Lloyd, and if the result is that that company increases the number of its steamers on this line, it will not only carry the bulk of the mails, but it will get lange support from shippers and passengers. If this should happen, the Directors of the P.
will have themselves to blame for the loss which their company will incur, loss which will not Ne confined to their earnings, but which will extend to their standing as a great ocean steamship line. It is inexplicable to us and to the public that the present Chairman of the P.& O., who is acquainted with the mauner in which business is conducted in Shanghai, should have sanctioned such an arrangement as that we protest against. When addressing his shareholders the other day he said much of the change of circumstances which his company had to meet, how in former times business came to it unasked, but now the utmost vigilance and activity had to be employed to secure a proper share of passenger and freight ie. And now he and his colleagues have exasperated one of the most influential mercantile communities in the East, and placed their companying this position, that it must either change the day which has been fixed upon for the departure of the mails during the Southwest monsoon, or both freight and passenger trafic will go past the English line. We hope that the Directors of the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.