Our travelling trio made a journey over the great railway line, and had an interesting ride. The engineering was found worthy of the praise that has been given by others; the passage of the mountains near Rio presented many obstacles which were successfully met by the English and American builders of the road. The line was begun by Englishmen, but since the first section was opened the work has been in charge of engineers from the United States.
Frank and Fred were disappointed in the amount of business over the road, as they had been told it drained a large district which produced coffee in abundance. The Doctor came to their relief with the following explanation:
"You must bear in mind," said he, "that there is a vast difference in the producing power of land, according to what is raised upon it. You cannot raise more than five hundred pounds of coffee from an acre of ground under the best conditions, while you can get five or ten times that weight in corn or wheat, especially the former. One gentleman who has studied the subject (Mr. Herbert H. Smith) says, the coffee district drained by the Dom Pedro railway and another line near it does not give one thirtieth as much freight as would come from the same area of ground in the western states of North America. The large plantations are very widely scattered, and their products do not afford sufficient business for the railways; much of the land held by the planters is uncultivated, and, besides, their laborers are mostly slaves, or people who have very few wants beyond what the country around them will meet.
ENTRANCE TO A COFFEE PLANTATION.
"A coffee plantation requires nothing but the machinery for tilling the land and preparing the coffee for market, the furniture, and some provisions for the house of the owner, and possibly a few bales of cloth for the garments of the slaves. The food of the negroes is grown on the place, their houses are built of bamboos, also grown there, and they raise enough mandioca and corn for their food. Those who have looked carefully into this matter say that long lines of railway in Brazil could not pay their running expenses if they were built for nothing. There have been several schemes for extending railways into the Matto Grosso province; at the present rate of freight it would cost eight dollars to bring a sack of coffee to Rio, which would be two-thirds of its value. The product of the land would not pay the cost of exporting it to a market."
"But why don't they raise corn or wheat instead of coffee?" one of the youths asked.
"They have talked of doing so," the Doctor answered, "and some parts of the interior provinces are well adapted to the culture of our American staples. But they have not the right kind of a population for such work, and even if they had it, the cost of bringing grain or flour to Rio would be greater at the present railway tariffs than transporting it from the United States. I am told it has been carefully figured out that wheat from Wisconsin or Minnesota could be laid down in Rio cheaper than wheat from the end of the Dom Pedro railway.
"While we are on the subject of railways," the Doctor continued, "you may be interested in knowing that Brazil owes some of her railway lines to a calamity."