But in the pursuit of wealth men will endure bad climate. That at Delagoa Bay is by no means so bad as to frighten passengers, though it will probably be injurious to the construction of the railway. To the ordinary traffic of a constructed railway it will hardly be injurious at all. If the Natal Colony would join the Transvaal in the cost, making the railway up to its own boundary, then the Natal line would no doubt be the best. The people of the Transvaal would compensate themselves for the bad harbour at Durban by the lessening of their own expenditure, and the line as a whole would be better for British interests in general than that to the Portuguese coast. But there is but little probability of this. Natal wants a line from its capital to its coast, and will have such a line almost by the time that these words are published. But it cares comparatively little for a line through 175 miles of its country up to its boundary at Newcastle, over which the traffic would be for the benefit of the Transvaal rather than for that of Natal. Estcourt and Newcastle which are in Natal would no doubt be pleased, but Natal will not spend its money for the sake of Estcourt and Newcastle. But when the route for the railway shall have been decided, whence shall the money come? No one looking at the position of the country will be slow to say that a railway is so necessary for the purposes of the Colony that it must expend its first and its greatest energies in achieving that object. It is as would be the possession of a corkscrew to a man having a bottle of wine in the desert. There is no getting at the imprisoned treasure without it. The farms will not be cultivated, the mines will not be worked, the towns will not be built, the people will not come without it. President Burgers, prone as he was to build castles in the air, saw at any rate, when he planned the railway, where the foundations should be laid for a true and serviceable edifice. But then we must return to the question,--whence shall the money come? Well-to-do Colonies find no difficulty in borrowing money for their own purposes at a moderate rate of interest,--say 4 per cent. Victoria and New South Wales have made their railways most successfully, and New Zealand has shown what a Colony can do in borrowing. But the Transvaal is not as yet a well-to-do Colony, and certainly could not go into the money market with any hope of success with the mere offer of her own security,--such as that security is at this moment. This is so manifestly the case that no one proposes to do so. Mr. Burgers went home for the purpose and succeeded only in getting a quantity of material,--for which, in the end, the British Government will have to pay probably more than twice the value.