ground for doubt that the Gulf ports will be stronger in their competition with New York than they ever were before so far as Oriental traffic is concerned. It is not all imagination, this boast one hears in the cities of the South, that in the years to come the headquarters of America's Oriental traffic may be along the Southern coast. Only, on the other hand, one well may doubt that the city which is the central American market for Oriental imports will ever lose its present domination in that particular traffic to and fro.

is usually only to get a better trade in some other place. Peace has reigned in transcontinental circles for twelve years past, ever since the big Canadian line made discount rates out of all the markets of the East through Vancouver and down the Coast to San Francisco Coast to San Francisco a wicked raid on a peaceful and harmless so said its bosses - little pool arrangement of their own made by the American transcontinentals.

Into this atmosphere of peace and, more or less, prosperity comes Uncle Sam with a fine new canal, open to anybody that

Pass from the little question of Oriental trade to the larger problem of domestic trade the barter between Americans of the East and Americans of the West. To-day, this trade flows back and forth along well-worn channels, routes of long standing, courses fixed and unchanged for many years. It is a long time since any daring railroad broke seriously into the transcontinental situation. Occasionally, even now, the Grand Trunk or the CanaIdian Pacific starts some excitement at New York, some back-door route at a fancy discount all the way around up through New England and Ontario; but it

may care to use it, within limits. Steamship lines out of New Orleans and New York - let us say - may bid powerfully for traffic across the continent, for this great, steady river of traffic flowing so smoothly along the rails.

Here is a challenge and a threat from Mr. Franklin K. Lane, contained in a decision handed down last year by the Interstate Commerce Commission, a Government body. Railroad traffic managers and railroad shippers alike may find it interesting:

The railroads, moreover, must soon meet with a competition by water more intense than any that they have heretofore suffered; for

So, according to Mr. Lane, there is to be reopened the long quiescent question between the sea and the land transportation machine in transcontinental traffic. It is a long time since anything like that really happened. It was in 1885, to be exact, that the ocean route died a quiet, unnatural death. That was the year when the Sunset-Gulf route the ships from New York connecting with the Southern Pacific at the Gulf - demondemonstrated its power to drive the clipper ships of America from the highways of the sea, to sterilize the Pacific Mail, and thereby to make the Panama Railroad more a curiosity than a railroad. That marked the end of the traffic epoch in the long transcontinental trade, and the beginning of another - the epoch of unchallenged railroad dominancy over the highways of commerce.

In the six years from 1885 to 1891, this Sunset-Gulf route carried nearly ninety tons out of every hundred tons of freight that moved from the Atlantic Seaboard to California. That constitutes pretty nearly a monopoly. It was earned by hard fighting. Along in the later stages of this battle to clear the sea of ships that would compete with the railroad-owned lines, the Sunset-Gulf route established a new record in New York-California trade. It was a carload of bamboo chairs. It moved from New York to San Francisco for $9.40! Let that instance be remembered as typical of the reason why the railroads have not been bothered much by sea-borne traffic from that day to this.

One minor factor has entered into the traffic equation in very recent years, in the shape of the American-Hawaiian steamship line, operating a rail-and-water route from New York to the East coast of Mexico, thence by rail across that re

public, and by water again to the Pacific Coast ports. Twelve years ago, this route began to operate through the Straits of Magellan; and six years ago it adopted this new hybrid route. It has lived, apparently, at peace with the railroads. Its rates are adapted to get the kind of tonnage it can handle to the best effect. It picks no quarrels with the railroads, and they pick none with it. At the present moment, it is probably carrying pretty close to 8 per cent. of the total transcontinental tonnage. If the total number of tons of freight across the continent is to-day approximately 3,500,000 tons — an unofficial figure the AmericanHawaiian line probably carries 280,000 tons. One finds it hard to call it a competitor of the railroad group.

"upon

"It lives," says Mr. Lane, "u sufferance.”

So, in the business between East and West, the empire of the railroads has been firmly established. The Cape Horn route is merely a tradition. The Panama Railroad and Pacific Mail are legends of twenty years ago. The Tehuantepec route works peacefully at settled rates in a strictly money-making venture that has no bearing on the question of traffic supremacy. Only the Suez, an ancient and too powerful rival, enters the Eastern field and sweeps it clean so far as the Oriental trade is concerned.

The great trade routes across the continent are man-made lines of steel. East of the Missouri, dozens of railroad lines, gathering traffic from all the busy industrial cities, pour this traffic through the gateways of the West into the assembling yards of seven so-called transcontinentals. These are the great trade routes from East to West, for the East, in a traffic sense, extends far into the West, even to Denver, where the rate blanket ends.

Beginning at the South, the first, and probably the most powerful, of these traffic giants is the Southern Pacific, the Sunset route. New Orleans is its Eastern terminus by rail; but its real Eastern terminus is on the docks of Manhattan, where its controlled freight steamers bid traffic out of every city and village and field from the Atlantic almost to Chicago.