THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 1910. FROM PACIFIC TO ATLANTIC.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10014, 9 April 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 1910. FROM PACIFIC TO ATLANTIC.

• A cable message received durinc the week stated that the Trans-Andine j railway, a wonderful engineering work, carried out by an English firm, which gives the first South American route from the Altantic ; to the Pacific had been completed. I The first train ran through the great tunnel at the summit of the route, connecting the Argentine and Chilian sections, on Wednesday last. It is a long time since South America has witnessed an event of greater importance than the completion of the traDs-Andine railway, enabling passengers to travel by rail trom Buenos Ayres to Valparaiso. That the first trans-continental railway of South I America should be opened to traffic | during the centennial year of Argen- j tina is eminently fitting. Argentina | is the richest and most progressive of I

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. The prosperity and progress of individual nations of the race have been very great in recent years. But South America is still without tnean3 of intercourse such as the exigencies of modem commerce demand. If Nature his endowed it with some of the finest waterways in the world, she has qualified hei 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 Chili, and not so many years ago the two countries were upon the point of fighting over the very boundary that it crosses. It is in its relation to the future that the event 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 l J ne 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 be 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. Now that the Buenos Ayres-Valparaiso railway is to traffic of all kinds, Chili and Peru will no longer live wedged between toe 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. After a period of comparative, though by no means complete, stagnation they will find themselves under the same influences that have made Buenos Ayres and Kio de Janeiro two of the most "go-head" capitals in the world. A long step will have been taken towards South American solidarity.