One advantage that will accrue from the completion of the canal will be better transportation between all the ports of the west coast and New York. A direct line of steamers between Valparaiso, and possibly ports farther south, to New York is sure to be established, for business conditions will not only demand, but warrant such a line. By this route the distance from New York to Valparaiso will be only fifty-one hundred miles, including the stops at several intervening ports. When this distance is compared with that from Valparaiso to Liverpool, by the way of the Straits of Magellan, which is ninety-five hundred miles, it shows that New York will be several thousand miles nearer to Valparaiso than European ports by the same route, and the difference becomes greater as you journey along the coast toward Panama. If British steamers should use the Panama Canal it would still make New York nearer to all the ports on the west coast by almost three thousand miles. As it is there are no boats flying the American flag which visit Chilean or other west coast ports, except an occasional tramp lumber schooner which comes down from Seattle, or a boat which comes through the Straits of Magellan now and then from New York for a load of nitrate. Much of the traffic is obliged to go to Callao, Peru, and there be transferred to another steamer to be taken to Panama; then it is shipped by rail across the Isthmus, and again loaded on another steamer destined either for New York or New Orleans. [Illustration: THE CUSTOM HOUSE, VALPARAISO.]