The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1910. PIERCING THE ANDES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2759, 7 February 1910, Page 4

The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1910. PIERCING THE ANDES.

The magnificent triumph achieved by British engineering in laying a railway tunnel through the Andes will shortly bring to fruition one of the greatest nation-building schemes of modern times. It is expected that by next month passengers ,will be able to travel by rail from Buenos Ayres to Valparaiso. Only comparable with this project are the vast railway schemes that are transforming Canada from a colonial dependency into a strong nation, the Cape to Cairo railway that will accomplish marvellous things for South Africa, and the Panama Canal. That the first transcontinental railway of South America should be opened to traffic during the centennial year - of Argentina is eminently fitting. Argentina, is the richest and most progressive of South American States, and to Argentine enterprise the inception of the railway was largely due. The completion of the line will mark the'beginning of a new era in the social and commercial history of the Latin American race. South America is still, without moans of intercourse such as the exigencies of modern commerce demand. If Nature lias -endowed it with some of the finest water-ways in the world, she lias qualified her bounty by building behind these waterways an almost impassable barrier of mountains. The result is that, though flourishing communities in direct touch with the Old World have grown up around the Amazon and the Plate -River, the countries of the Pacific coast- have reaped only slight benefit from their development. The construction of the trans-Andine railway was only made (possible by cordial co-operation between Argentina and Chile, and not so many years ago the two countries were on the point of fighting over the very boundary that it crosses. But .it is in its relation to the future that- the approaching completion of the trans-continental lino is most significant. There seems little doubt that the new railway is only the forerunner of a series of similar ventures. At the present moment another transcontinental line is contemplated by way of Bolivia; while nearer the equator Brazil is building a line westwards towards the Peruvian frontier. To the

south one of the great Argentine railway systems is pushing its tentacles across the Pampas, and means, it is said, eventually to extend one of them to the Pacific. When finished, these railways may bo expected to revolutionise the relations of the States of South America not only among themselves, but, in all probability } with the rest of the world. When even the Buenos Ayres-Valparaiso railway is open to traffic of all kinds, Chile and Peru will no longer live wedged between the Pacific and the walls of the Andes in a backwater remote from the great streams of world commerce. They will be in direct and constant intercourse with the progressive countries to the east of them and will be brought proportionately closer to Europe. Alter a period of comparative, though by no means complete, stagnation, they will find themselves under the same influences that have made Buenos Ayres and Bio de Janeiro two of the most ‘goahead ’ capitals in the world. A long step will have been taken towards South American solidarity.