Enough of this. Suffice it to say that among all these oratorical colonels, generals, lawyers, ministers of state, and accomplished editors, there was not one who had the honesty or the pluck to stand up and declare that it was all false which had so eloquently been said of the Oroya and the Arequipa Railways. They are neither the railways of the age nor of the day. There is one short railway in South America, the construction of which called forth more skill, pluck, and endurance than all the Meiggs railways put together, and this one railway has already earned in the first quarter of the century of its existence more money than all the government railways will ever earn during the next age. Hundreds of these inflated colonels and generals, judges, ministers of state, and accomplished editors, must have passed over the railway, which, running through a tropical forest, connects the Pacific with the Atlantic Ocean. Meiggs himself must have known it well; but neither he nor any of the inspired idiots who drowned him in butter had the valour to make mention of it by one poor word. The bridge over the Chagres river is of more utility, as it will win more enduring fame, than all the bridges on the Oroya, including those which 'are sixteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.' The Oroya bridges bear the same relation to those on the Panama Railway as the feat of the man who walked across the Falls of Niagara bears to the economy of walking. As Blondin was the only man who made any profit out of that performance, so Meiggs, the Messiah of railways, will be the only person who will for some time to come profit by the building of the Oroya and Lima line of railway. It is surely impossible that all the reports one has been compelled to give ear to of great silver mines and mines of copper existing on this line can be false. Yet mining, especially in Peru, is not free from danger; it is also not a little mixed up with lying and cheating, and it has a historical reputation for exaggeration. The copper mines on the Chimbote line, however, are quite another matter. If those on the Oroya can be demonstrated to be equally good, and the silver mines only half as good and as great, Peru may yet lift up her head. But he will be a bold man that shall apply to English capitalists for the first loan to Peruvian miners or to be invested in Peruvian mines, and the days of faith and trust will not have passed away when the money shall have been subscribed. Although it was a poet who said that 'Borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,' yet it is as true as if it had emanated from the Stock Exchange, the _Times_ monetary article, or any other recognised fountain of practical knowledge; and as for the native edge of Peruvian industry, it is about as dull as that of a razor not made to shave but to sell--as dull, in fact, as the edge of a hatchet made of lead. FOOTNOTES: