To-day these peoples do not know one another. Paris is their intellectual capital, where their poets, thinkers, and statesmen meet. In America everything makes for separation: forests, plains, and mountains. What does Venezuela know of Chili, Peru of Mexico, Colombia of the Argentine? Even in the case of neighbouring nations the political leaders do not know one another. The psychology of neighbouring peoples is a mystery; whence traditional errors and disastrous wars. American journalism is ignorant of nothing in European life--the sessions of the Duma, the ministerial crises of {345} Roumania, the nobility of the Gotha Almanac, the scandals of Berlin; but of the public life of the American nations it publishes only the vaguest and most erroneous news. By stimulating the love of travel and building railroads these peoples would escape from an isolation so perilous. "Every line of railroad which crosses a frontier," said Gladstone, "prepares the way for universal confederation." The Yankees have understood this, which is why they are preparing to build a great Pan-American railway to unite the two Americas under their financial sceptre. The line which has recently united the two capitals of the South--Santiago and Buenos-Ayres--has contributed to the formation of a solid understanding between Chili and the Argentine. That which will unite Lima and Buenos-Ayres in the near future will bring the culture of the Argentine to the Bolivian table-lands, as far as Cuzco, the centre of Inca tradition; it will draw together the seaboard populations of the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and will prove a powerful agent of civilisation and unity. The great rivers of the Amazonian basin from the Putumayo to the Beni, the affluents of the Rio de la Plata, the Magdalena and the Orinoco, united by new railroads, will also contribute to the continental unity by multiplying international relations. One may well repeat the celebrated phrase, that to govern is to lay rails. Railways vanquish barbarism; they attract the stranger, people the desert, civilise the native. Political organisation and internal peace correspond with the development of the means of communication. With the appearance of the rails the _caudillos_ lose their influence, and a double transformation is effected; in the interior by the civilising action of commingled interests, and at the exterior by the new relations which the multiplication of railways involves.