That there will ever be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape seems to me exceedingly doubtful, for the political, territorial, and financial obstacles are many, and not easily to be disposed of; but that the not-far-distant future will see the completion, under international auspices, of this great transcontinental trunk line seems to me to be as certain as that the locomotive sparks fly upward or that the hoar-frost on the rails disappears before the sun. Rhodes always said that the success of such a system must largely depend on the junctions to the east and west coasts, which would affect such a line very much as tributary streams affect a river. A number of such feeders are already in operation and others are rapidly building. Beginning at the north, the main line of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is tapped at Cairo by the railways from Port Said and Suez; and at Atbara Junction, in the Sudan, a constantly increasing stream of traffic flows in over the line from Port Sudan, a harbour recently built to order on the Red Sea. The misnamed Uganda Railway is in regular operation between Mombasa on the Indian Ocean and Port Florence on the Victoria Nyanza, whence there is a steamer service to Entebbe in Uganda. From Dar-es-Salam, the capital of German East Africa, the Germans are rushing a railway through to Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the engineer-in-chief assuring me that it would be completed and in operation by the summer of 1914. From Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, the Beira, Mashonaland, and Rhodesia Railway carries an enormous stream of traffic inland to its junction with the main line at Bulawayo. Still farther south a line from the Portuguese possession of Delagoa Bay connects with the main system at Mafeking, on the borders of Bechuanaland, while Kimberley is the junction for a line from Durban, in Natal, and De Aar for feeders from East London and Port Elizabeth, in Cape of Good Hope. From Swakopmund, on the other side of the continent, a railway has already been pushed nearly five hundred miles into the interior of German Southwest Africa which will eventually link up with the “Cape-to-Cairo” in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls, running through German territory practically all the way. Still another line is being built inland from Lobito Bay in Angola (Portuguese West Africa) to join the transcontinental system near the Congo border, nearly half of its total length of twelve hundred miles being completed. It is estimated that by means of this line the journey between England and the cities of the Rand will be shortened by at least six days. It will be seen, therefore, that the “Cape-to-Cairo” system will have eleven great feeders, eight of which are already completed and in operation, while all of the remaining four will be carrying freight and passengers before the close of 1914.