The Railway Conquest of the World

THE Florida express was speeding southwards over the railway which skirts the coast of Florida for mile after mile. Among the passengers was Mr. Henry Flagler, one of America's captains of industry and finance. He was gazing out idly to sea. On the horizon were streams of vessels steaming northwards and southwards in two long flung-out lines. They were units in the great coastal service of steamships which ply incessantly up and down this long stretch of coast between New York, the West Indies and the ports dotted along the shore line of the Gulf of Mexico.

At that time the island of Cuba was undergoing a wonderful change. Its vast resources were being exploited by men of initiative and energy from the two sides of the Atlantic, and the steamship traffic between the island and the mainland was advancing by leaps and bounds.

The financier was cogitating deeply. His thoughts had strayed to the subject of this development, and the fresh impetus it would receive when the Isthmus of Panama was at last pierced and vessels could float through the neck of the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He was the controlling force of the railway over which he was then traveling, and he was weighing the question as to whether new sources of revenue could not be tapped for this system. The southernmost point reached by the Florida East Coast railway was Miami, and though it was a rising town, he saw that its future was limited, because it formed, as it were, a dead-end to the line.

As a result of his ruminations he decided to make a bold bid for the Cuban trade -- to deflect traffic from the decks