Perhaps the most interesting sight in Rosario and one that best marks its progress on the stage to greatness is the workshop of the Central Argentine Railway. When it is considered that as yet only a beginning has been made with railway communications in South America, and yet here is a great industry engaged in repairing numberless engines and building vast numbers of carriages, imagination can hardly place a limit to the greatness of Rosario as a railway centre when Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia shall have through communication with Buenos Aires and Rosario. These countries, with the greater part of the Argentine Gran Chaco, represent to the Province of Buenos Aires what the West represented to the Eastern States of North America seventy years ago, but instead of being chiefly wheat and cattle countries (all of which Buenos Aires already has in abundance) they contain the priceless tropical products which from time immemorial have been the main objects of trade. And, again, the mines of Bolivia and Brazil, the best of which are unworked, probably unknown, will pour their wealth down the basin of the Parana.[145] It is said that Brazil has coal equal in quality to that of Yorkshire, and if this could be brought cheaply into Argentina one main impediment to her manufacturing efficiency would be removed. The Central Argentine is an English company, and thus our traders have a great advantage in Argentina, as the English railways naturally buy engines and stores from home. The Rosario workshop turns out carriages and effects every kind of repair, but the locomotives are imported. An engine made at Hunslet in 1875 is still doing good work, whereas American engines go to the scrap-heap in three years. Those of Kitson, of Leeds, are of everlasting wear, and much of the work of Byer, Peacock, Manchester, and of George Stephenson, Darlington, is to be seen at Rosario. Some of the engines and machinery at the forge are American, but Butler and Co., of Halifax, are prominent. Of the carriages some come from Milwaukee, some from Birmingham, but now a very large proportion is made in the workshops. Most of the workmen appear to be Spaniards or Italians, but in better positions Irishmen are numerous; in fact, on St. Patrick's Day hotel accommodation can hardly be obtained at Rosario, and the Irish and Scotch language is spoken with perfect purity by men who have never been outside the boundaries of the Republic. [Illustration: CALLE CORDOBA, ROSARIO.]