Excerpt from The Cosmopolitan, Vol. 15: August, 1893 As regards operating the road, when completed, numerous difficulties will also be encountered. In places there will be lack of stone or wood for construction; over a large portion of the line, metal railway ties and tel egraph poles will have to be used. Coal exists in suf ficient quantities only in few places, necessitating the general use of, probably, petrol eum as fuel, which is now in general use on many South American rail roads. Labor ex ists along the line in varied quantity and inferior qual ity. The average South American In dian or half-breed don't care to do much work and has many attractive religious feast days, which take preference to all else to be attended to. The total cost of constructing a railroad to join all systems on the American con tinent would approximate two hundred millions of dollars. Instead of raising this sum by general contributions to stock or by subscriptions of the governments, it is assumed that the work would better be done by land and mineral grants given by each country directly interested. To private parties or syndicates and contrae tors. Each country would enter all materi als for construction free of duty military protection and absolute neutrality would be guaranteed the contractors in case of war. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.