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Show I In the South Lands. Africa will be better known fifteen years hence than Central Asia. Grejt Britain has completed a railroad from the easb coast; up and across the Zambesi river, which makes the completion of the Cape and Cairo road merely a matter of connecting connect-ing this new road with the one coming down from Egypt and the one coming up. from Cape Town. The French have pierced the Sahara with a railroad rail-road as far as Tlmbuctoo, and along the line date-palms date-palms are growing and the desert is receding. It is possible that in a few years more there will be no more Sahara than there now is a Great American Amer-ican desert. And commerce is carrying heavier and heavier cargoes that way. The Suez can"l, which began with 361,000 tons in 1871, thirty years later, in 1901, the tonnage had swelled to over 10,000,000, and the revenues exceeded $20,000,000. Of the tonnage 14 per cent, was German, which shows that she is at work in China and Eastern Africa. These figures show what Europe is doing toward making in Africa 'homes for the children of the present generation. It is most strange that our country and countrymen are not doing the same thing in South America. We are building the Panama canal, but, as it now looks, we are. doing that for the ships of the Old World. There is nolhing being done to restore our merchant marine, ma-rine, or to make trade centers in South America when the canal shall have been finished. South America is a better continent to subdue and enlighten than is Africa. There is a place where millions and tens of millions of young Americans Amer-icans could find homes and profitable business were but some railroads, built through it. As it is, English and German capital is building the roads, and to the masses of the people the fact that north of them Is a world power called the United States is hardly known. One would think that the fields and' the chance for profits in that 'south-land would have their effect on our railroad magnates. We would think that a monopoly on rubber and the chance to find new oil wells would prompt Mr.. Rockefeller to stretch a railroad frbrif the Caribbean Sea to Buenos Ayres, with a branch tD . Rio. There are measureless tre. res there; gold and silver and precious gems, vast' empires of fertile fer-tile lands, millions of acres of rare timber a land where all the elements of empire are in full evidence, evi-dence, and where a new world could be built, equipped and adorned with all rare accompaniments. accompani-ments. There would be such opportunities, too, for young Americans, such cities to found and build up, such miglity tracts of territory to subdue, roads and bridges to build, mines to open a world's creation. cre-ation. What keeps our millionaires from lifting their eyes and taking in the splendors of a possession pos-session that can be had now for the taking? |