The same progressive spirit which the Argentine has manifested in the improvement of inland or maritime waterways is to be seen in the establishment of its network of railways. Here again development has been rapid, and results plainly effectual in making the wealth of the country available. To cite one example only, it is thanks to the railways that agriculture and stock-raising have been able to attain to such large dimensions in the Province of Buenos Ayres; a Province far less favoured than its northern neighbours in the matter of waterways. All the lines running south have greatly contributed to the transformation of the Pampa and the increase of the cultivated area over an immense radius where before there was nothing but untilled soil, which was hardly suited even for stock-raising. The railway has thus played a great part in civilising the Argentine; raising new wealth from soil as yet unexploited, joining up the chief agricultural centres, and affording them an outlet to the rivers or the sea. The railway has also been auxiliary to the colonising movement, stimulating the creation of new settlements along its track by concessions of soil. This latter work is not yet terminated, if we are to judge by the great number of concessions now under consideration, in which the initiative is due to the State or to private individuals. On the other hand, there is a great tendency to build cheap narrow-gauge railways, in order to save expense either in building or in working, so as to obtain a final reduction of the freight tariff. In short, we find, in the case of railways as well as in the case of waterways, that while the continuation of good harvests is counted on, there is also an effort to keep up, by multiplying the means of transport, with the economic expansion of the country. It was in 1854 that the Government of the Province of Buenos Ayres granted the first railway concession, for a line 24,000 _vares_[22] in length, running west from Buenos Ayres. In 1857 a first section, some 6 miles long, was opened for traffic. [Footnote 22: The _vare_ is equivalent to 886 millimetres, so the length of the line was about 13 miles. At that period, in the region of the concession, the _vare_ of land had only a trifling value.] After these humble beginnings the railway system of the Argentine developed with great rapidity; on the 1st of November 1908, its total length was 13,700 miles, representing an average development of nearly 273 miles per annum. All the Provinces are represented in these figures, but of course in very unequal proportions; as the opportunities of construction have not been everywhere the same. Their installation has gone hand in hand with agricultural development; and the Provinces most adapted to agriculture have also been favoured with the most plentiful means of transit, as the following table will show.