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Australia is the latest country to catch the transcontinental railway fever and, with an energy characteristic of pioneer lands, has taken the most direct way of getting what it wants. The Parliament of South Australia has formally invited capitalists of Europe and America to bid for the contract of connecting the city of Adelaide on the south coast with Palmerston on the north coast. Ninety million acres of land along the right of way, with all the minerals and other sources of wealth they may contain, are offered as a bonus to the company that has the courage to undertake a project that will cost from $30,000,000 to $40,000,000, and to operate a railroad through twelve hundred miles of semi-desert land that has only one white inhabitant to every three square miles. But 90,000,000 acres of land, even in the most unpromising region on the earth's surface, may well be a temptation when it is offered at forty cents an acre; and capitalists are not so much afraid of big railway ventures now as they were before the Union Pacific was finished, thirty-five years ago. England is constructing the "Cape to Cairo" to connect Egypt with Cape Town, and Belgium, England and Germany will cross this line in the Congo country with a road running from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. It is now possible for passengers to step on board a train in any European capital and steam away across Central Asia for Canton, China, over the Chinese-Eastern Railway. In many ways this proposed Australian railway line, when it comes to be built, will encounter the same difficulties that were met in the building of the Union and Central Pacific roads. There is no mountain system to be crossed and no great rivers to be bridged, but there are broad reaches of desert, as hot as those of Arizona and so little known that the maps show blank spaces for hundreds of miles in extent. All Australia taken together is within 50,000 square miles as large as the United States. In the interior deserts ten states as big as Pennsylvania could be dropped down and lost. Although the distance to be covered is only 1,200 miles, or as far as from New York to the Mississippi River, the cost will be something enormous, and the returns must, for years, be a matter for conjecture rather than a matter that can be figured out. The bonus offered is about 15 per cent of the entire area of South Australia. The United States gave only 25,000,000 acres to the Union and Central Pacific for building a road twice as long. It is confidently believed in Adelaide that Canton, China, is to be the great port of debarkation for European traffic to the east, and that Palmerston, South Australia, only ninety-six hours from Canton by fast steamer, is to become the great Australian seaport to connect with Europe. BIGGEST SHIPS AFLOAT |