Note 678 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

If we compare the countries of Central and South America, where railroads are still mere adjuncts of river and coastwise routes, a stage of development prevalent in the United States till 1858, we find an unmistakable relation between navigable waterways and railroad mileage. The countries with ample or considerable river communication, like Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Paraguay, are all relatively slow in laying railroads as compared with Mexico and Argentine, even when allowance is made for differences of zonal location, economic development, and degree of European elements in their respective populations. Mexico and Argentine, having each an area only about one-fourth that of Brazil but a railroad mileage nearly one-fourth greater, have been pushed to this development primarily by a common lack of inland navigation. Similarly South Africa, stricken with poverty of water communication south of the Zambesi, has constructed 7500 miles of railroads678 in spite of the youth of the country and the sparsity of its white population. Similar geographic conditions have forced the mileage of Australian railways up to twice that of South Africa, in a country which is still in the pastoral and agricultural stage of development, and whose most densely populated province Victoria has only fourteen inhabitants to the square mile. In the almost unpeopled wastes of Trans-Caspia, where two decades ago the camel was the only carrier, the Russian railroad has worked a commercial revolution by stimulating production and affording an outlet for the irrigated districts of the encircling mountains.679 In our own Trans-Missouri country, where the scanty volume of the streams eliminated all but the Missouri itself as a dependable waterway, even for the canoe travel of the early western trappers, railroads have developed unchecked by the competition of river transportation.680 With no rival nearer than the Straits of Magellan and the Isthmus of Panama for transportation between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast, they have fixed their own charges on a monopoly basis, and have fought the construction of the Isthmian Canal.