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Lyttelton Times, Volume LVII, Issue 6535, 6 February 1882, Page 4

The intercolonial and interprovincial passenger trade has increased, enormously daring the last few years, we may almost say months. That is no reason why the Union Steamship Company should be allowed to carry habitually more passengers than its steamers have room for. Scarcely a week passes without the publication in some newspaper of an instance of overcrowding in a Union Company’s vessel. We have heard of a gentleman who facetiously informed his' friends, before taking a trip under the auspices of the Union Company, that he intended to ask for a berth on the top of the funnel, as that was the only vacant place which he could see in the whole ship. Tales of men sleeping on tables, on cabin floors, on deck in every imaginable corner, are not wanting to enliven the public mind. The thing has its profitable as well as its humorous aspect. The urbane manager of the Company washes his bands with the celebrated invisible soap, as he blandly informs a Parliamentary Select Committee —very select —that he has no particular desire to see a direct line of steamers established between Great Britain and New Zealand. He manages to convey the impression that such a company must somehow come to grief quite too utterly. He adds that an indirect line, by Australia, would be much better. The Committee knows that the profitable work of being the connecting link in this indirect communication, is already very arduous. The Committee realises suddenly from the

urbane manager's benign countenance that any increase in the traffic of the already established indirect lines, which may be brought about by a subsidy, will lead to a widening of several inches in the already ample waistcoats of the Union Oompany’s Directors. Nobody blames the urbane manager for smiling, or the ■ happy Directors for exhibiting in their persons the result of the laughter which takes the form of contented smiling. As long as the travelling public chooses to submit to inconvenience for the benefit of steamship Companies, no one has a right to complain. But inconvenience is not all. There are other reasons why the law restricting the number of passengers to be carried by passenger ships is good. They are to be summed up in the fact that overcrowding endangers the safety of a ship, and makes too much call on the life saving appliances in case of danger. We do not know whether the limits of safety have been overstepped by the Union Company. But we have seen ample evidence for a primA facie case against them. And we have never heard of a single public official fearless enough to bring any primd facie case into Court' against them. The public has a right to know the reason why what is presumably systematic evasion of the law is systematically permitted.