I was invited to go out that I might see and report what had been done and what was being done, and to examine the works which had transformed the desert of Tarapaca wastes without a sign of life or vegetation — into a centre of commercial enterprise, and which had covered it with ani mated industry and prosperous life. It had been asserted in certain journals that commercial enterprises in that region were shams swindles, indeed, would be the word to use if they were what those organs described them to be — and that a railway, in which the public had invested largely, was a tramway ending in a marsh. Although I can not say I was a very Gallio in respect to these things, I certainly knew nothing of them. I told my friends that I was perfectly and altogether ignorant in that con nection. So much the better! All I would have to do was to judge for myself and relate what I saw. There was no mystery to penetrate, no theory to demolish or sus tain, no complex problems to study.