On the other side was the cost of construction of the line; he would not speak of the cost of working, for, though there was no doubt that it would be less than the cost of working the transport services hitherto in operation, yet the saving might be left out of sight as not worth mentioning. The cost of constructing a railway to the coast could not be definitely calculated, particularly as the route was not yet decided upon. Whether the route of our caravan-road should be, with slight alterations, retained; whether another route to Mombasa should be chosen; or whether the coast should be reached at quite another point, nobody could say at present, when only one of the routes had been surveyed at all, and that only very imperfectly. But on the supposition that no better route could be found than the old one, or that this should be ultimately chosen on technical grounds, he could positively assert that the railway could not possibly cost nearly so much as the savings of the immigrants would amount to in the course of a few years. And, in consequence of the way in which labour was organised in Freeland, every increase in the produce of labour was converted into immediate gain to the whole community. We should therefore proceed at once to construct the railway, even if it were merely to the advantage of the immigrants. That it was not merely to their advantage, however, was self-evident, since the profit which the community would derive from the cheapening and facilitating of the goods traffic would be infinitely greater--so great that it could not be even approximately calculated. He merely wished to throw a few rays of light upon the economic result of the railway. Assuming that the line would be completed in three years, we should then have a population of about a million, and there was no doubt that when we had sufficient means of transport we should be able easily to produce ten million hundredweight of grain for export. Such a quantity of grain at the Kenia then represented one and a-half million pounds sterling. If the cost of transport sank from five or six shillings per cwt., the current price--independently of the fact that a greater quantity could not then be conveyed--to one shilling, or at most eighteen-pence, which might be looked upon as the maximum railway freight for 600 miles, then the value of the above quantity of grain would be raised to a round two million pounds sterling. In short, he was firmly convinced that the railway, even at the highest probable cost, must fully pay for itself in three or four years at the latest. He therefore proposed that they should at once send out several expeditions of skilled engineers to find the most suitable route for the future line. They should not proceed too cautiously, for even a considerable difference in cost would be preferable to loss of time.