WILL IT PAY? 83

out a single section of one hundred miles that is not likely to contribute
its share of a revenue sufficient to make this a paying road. One
portion will have a large surplus of the products of the soil; another
portion, the people of which draw their wealth, not from the soil, but
from the mines, will need this surplus. Ores will be sent to fuel and
fuel to ores. Thus there will be a large and perpetual exchange
between the agricultural and the mineral portions of the route — be-
tween the fertile prairies of the East, the coal mines and forests of
the first mountain slope, and the gold and silver and copper mines of
New Mexico, Arizona and California. There is probably no single
line of railroad on the globe the products along the border of which
are at once so various and so dissimilar. This peculiarity of the line
of road under consideration will lead to an exchange of commodities
to an enormous amount, between communities hundreds of miles
asunder. The farmer of Kansas will probably find his best market in
Arizona.

But we are not left to conjecture and vague generalities as the
basis of our estimates. During the month of May, 1867, this road
was commercially open to Salina, a distance of 187 miles from Kansas
City. The gross earnings for that month were $172,106.28, which
amount, divided by 187, gives a business at the rate of eleven thousand
dollars per mile per annum. During the same period the net profits
were $72,000, or at the rate of $4,567 per mile per annum. The
amount of business done for the Government during that month — at
rates greatly below what had hitherto been paid for freights by wagon
— was a little over fifty-one thousand dollars, one half of which passed |
to the credit of the Company on its Government bonds, enough to pay
the interest on all the bonds of the Company, and leave a surplus suf-
ficient to extinguish the principal ten years before the bonds mature.
The remainder of the month’s business, amounting to more than
$120,000, was principally local trade and travel—so rapidly is the
rich valley of the Kansas, through which it passes, filling up with an
active and prosperous population.* If such results can be shown in
the infancy of the enterprise, surely we may safely calculate upon
still richer results as the work progresses, and as the great wave of
population which is following it shall swell to larger and larger pro-
portions.

* The return for the month of June, owing to the flood, fell off some 25 or 30 per
cent.; but that for July was larger than that for May, the western commercial ter-
minus being the same. Now the end of the commercial line has been extended to
Wilson’s Creek, nearly 250 miles beyond Kansas City.