The transcontinental tonnage now handled by the railroads, which ultimately will go by the canal, aggregates 3,000,000 tons a year. The seaboard sections of the United States, of course, will benefit more largely than interior points, for the reason that interior points will have to take a combined rail-and-water route. This will involve railroad transportation and transhipment of cargo, also rehandling charges. After the canal is opened it is probable that the railroads will prefer to supply the intermountain States directly from eastern sources, instead of maintaining the existing policy of giving low rates to Pacific coast cities, so as to give them dominance over the shipping business of the intermountain region. The total coast-to-coast traffic of the railroads is said to approximate one-fifth of the entire traffic carried across the Rocky Mountains. Only one-third of the through traffic of the transcontinental lines from the East to the West originates east of a line drawn through Buffalo and Pittsburgh. It is this third of the westward business that will be affected mainly by the operation of the canal. [Illustration: INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING ROUTES] The principal effect the Panama Canal will have in the readjustment of the trade map of the world is not, perhaps, as much in changing existing routes as in creating new avenues of business. In every region where there is promise of unusual benefit by reason of the opening of the Panama Canal, an effort is being made to capitalize the advantages to be derived therefrom. The west coast of South America feels the stimulus of suddenly being brought thousands of miles closer to the best markets of the world, and anyone who travels down the coast from Panama may see at every port signs of a determination to reap full advantage of the new opportunities. Even Guayaquil, a city that for years has been a hissing and a byword to the masters of all ships plying up and down the west coast because of its absolute indifference to all requirements of sanitation, has prepared for a campaign of cleaning-up, in order that it may become a port of call for all the ships passing that way. Heretofore, masters of ships, in order to comply with quarantine regulations elsewhere, have given it a wide berth whenever possible. Chile, Peru, and Ecuador--all three have caught the spirit of the new era which a completed canal proclaims, and are striving to set their houses in order for the quickened times they see ahead. With the Central American Republics it is the same. Handicapped as they are by revolutions that sap their life-blood, or dominated by rulers who have no other object in governing the people than to exploit them, these countries still hope for much from the canal, and new activities are beginning to spring up in every one of them.