Registered in the United States, the Brazil Railway Company is really a monument to French confidence in Brazil, in that the capital employed, as well as the properties acquired, is Gallic in origin to a large extent. The capital of the company is fifteen hundred million francs, and of this huge sum nine hundred million francs were subscribed in Paris, the rest of the money coming from Brussels and London. The company is interested in thirty-eight subsidiary companies, including several railroads which were bought or leased (and, in the case of the Madeira-Mamoré, constructed), a frigorifico recently completed on Rio docks, a flourishing cattle company, a land and colonization company, lumber business, interest in ports, as at Pará, Rio Grande City and Rio de Janeiro (leased out to another company), a steamship service on the Amazon river, et cetera. Land owned by the cattle company totals to over eight million acres, in the States of Matto Grosso, S. Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, and serious efforts are being made to improve the stock of the two or three hundred thousand head of cattle kept in various regions by the introduction of first-class breeding stock. Animals are sold to the second of S. Paulo’s packing-houses, the frigorifico at Osasco, just outside S. Paulo city, an American owned and operated enterprise[7] dating also from 1914, which has friendly connection with the Brazil Railways. A few of the interests of the Brazil Railways are in a prosperous state, as the lumber and cattle businesses, but the position of the company as a whole suffers from the weaker elements of the group, perhaps particularly the Amazonian, which were injected into the earlier South Brazilian plans; many of the development companies not only do not pay but need money to carry them along. The affairs of the company are now in the hands of an American receiver, and the latest report presented to long-suffering shareholders at a London meeting was optimistic in tone. It is the most ambitious group of enterprises under one control in Brazil, and perhaps this is one reason why its plan of line, land and port management has not been always looked upon with a favourable eye by Brazilian authorities. Objection seems also to be made to the introduction of foreign capital not for the purpose of development work of a new kind, but when employed in acquiring properties already existing.[8] In South Brazil the company operates over three thousand miles of line, including the State-owned Sorocabana, the São Paulo-Rio Grande, the Paraná line, the Auxiliaire traversing Rio Grande do Sul, and the little Thereza Christina in Santa Catharina.