Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 143, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 June 1913 — ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO PAT [ARTICLE]

ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO PAT

Financial Gain Little Considered In the Construction of Railroads J -- in Asia. The question that a railway company in Europe or the Americas asks itself when considering the construction of a new line is, "Will it pay? Will the ultimate returns from freight and passenger traffic be equal to a fair interest on the money invested?” If this question is answered in the negative, unless there is a bonus or guaranty of some sort forthcoming, the line will not be built If this same test had been applied in Asia, 50 per cent, of the great continent’s present railway mileage would be non-existent, Lewis R. Ryeeman writes in the American Review of Reviews. Asia is—and will be for many years—in a formative state politically. Frontiers and spheres of influence are being advanced and pushed back, and the ability or inability of a power to speedily place an army at some remote point of vantage may mean the differing between winning or losing a province, or even a kingdom. Railways have been built, therefore, regardless of their 1 promise, remotely or even, to pay adequate financial returns. It is these strategic and semistrategic considerations which principally differentiate Asiatic —and to a lesser degree African —railway development from that of the more settled occidental continents. Russia had more in mind the winning of Manchuria, Port Arthur and the long striven for ice free port at Dalney than the development of the thousands of miles of intervening steppes when she embarked on the titanic task of constructing the TransSiberian railway. The branches of that line toward the borders of Chinese Turkestan, and the line from the Caspian to the Oxus and the Persian borders, were only stepping stones to the realization of Russia’s supreme ambition, the conquest of India. That all these schemes were given an indefinite setback in the defeat of Russia by Japan was no fault of the railways. Japan is constantly strengthening her position in Korea and Manchuria by,the construction of lines not warranted commercially, and India has gridironed with rails the bleak deserts of her vulnerable northwest frontier. Strategic considerations, too, will outweigh all others in determining by what route, and by what powers, the long talked of Europe to India railway will be built. It should be borne in mind, however, that many lines or sections of lines built primarily for strategic purposes have, later, yielded considerable returns through the channels of regular business, thus quickening into life great sections which must otherwise have lain dormant. In the long run, therefore, there has been real economic benefit from this con struction apparently abnormal from an economic point of view.