through show how seriously this physical divorce has been felt, and give an earnest of the large results which are sure to follow the completion of the task. There have been other reasons for the backward development of western South America. To begin with, the Spanish, not a progressive and pioneering race, laid their hands on these countries four hundred years ago, and have held them politically or racially ever since. This would not in itself have kept out the Anglo-Saxon or the German. But these countries have not yet been greatly needed as an outlet of the surplus populations of Europe. Even the United States is very far from being filled up, and Canada is likely to be giving away farms for many years to come. The Teutonic race, to which above all others the trusteeship of Western civilization is committed, has left these Spanish Americas, with their revolutions coming almost as frequently and regularly as the seasons, comparatively unvisited. As yet the North European emigration to the southern continent has been mainly confined to Argentina and Southern Brazil. In one respect the isthmian breakwater has been profitable to these states of the Pacific coast. It has sheltered them largely from the negro element which has spread so widely over the West Indies and the southern United States. But Japan and China are already there, and the yellow will be laid on more and more thickly unless these countries are brought quickly within the zone of Western ideas and enterprise. And that process is likely to begin with the opening of the canal. The backwardness of these regions is indeed almost unbelievable. Most people think of them as producing mainly nitrates and revolutions. But their possible resources and products are illimitable, and are only awaiting the organized capital of the West to be made available for human service. As yet these Latin republics are in their middle ages of development. There are few railways, only one continuous transcontinental line having been completed between Valparaiso, through Mendoza, to Buenos Aires. Their internal communications are carried on mainly by the pack mule, as they have been since the days of Pizarro and Valdivia. Each country, of course, has a foreign trade, but the people of the interior, the Indians or mixed breeds, live in isolated communities which are self-sufficing, raise their own food and make their own simple manufactures, knowing little or nothing of the products of foreign countries.