Now we begin to get these roads running down into the immediate Southwest from Chicago and into their proper relationship--the Rock Island, with its lines from Chicago, St. Louis, and Memphis, coming together and reaching to El Paso and out to the Colorado Lines near the eastern Colorado border; the Santa Fe, taking the original Missouri Pacific between Kansas City and St. Louis for a much-needed entrance into the latter city and touching the Colorado Lines at La Junta and the Californian both at Albuquerque and at El Paso; the Burlington shorn of its Twin Cities line, but given either the Missouri Pacific west of Kansas City or the former Kansas Pacific (to-day a detached but well-built branch of the Union Pacific) or both and terminating both at the Colorado State line and, by the acquisition of the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient and the building of a few hundred miles of railroad, with the Californian somewhere in the general neighborhood of Albuquerque. Here is balance. Here is a fair adjustment between logical competitors, the retention of competition where it is not practicable to eliminate it, and its abolishment where it is feasible to uproot it and establish great operating economies in the wake of the change. * * * * * We are not quite done. We have hardly considered the South. It is very much entitled to consideration, with its great growth in the last few years and its wonderful opportunities of the immediate future. But because, like California, it still has its intensive growth in the future rather than in the past, it is not too late to bend it into the economic regional plan. We left the Californian railroad with an important eastern terminal at El Paso. El Paso is in Texas, even though it is barely in it, and so becomes quite the logical western terminal of the Texas lines, which would exclusively cover in our scheme virtually the entire State east from Beaumont, Shreveport and Texarkana and south from Dallas and Fort Worth. It might even be possible to give the Texas regional system a direct entrance into Kansas City by acquisition of the entire Kansas City Southern, but I would doubt the wisdom of this. It would have the effect of throwing the delicate competitive shading remaining about that very great railroad center considerably out of balance. For if Kansas City by direct line, why not St. Louis or even Chicago?