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TWENTY-FOUR PAGE PAMPHLET SENT ON RECEIPT OF REQUEST

NOV 4 1904

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

THE

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QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 400.-OCTOBER, 1904.

Art. I.-THE PANAMA CANAL AND MARITIME COM

MERCE.

1. Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission, 1899-1901; 57th Congress, 1st Session. Senate Document No. 54. Washington, 1901.

2. Supplementary Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission; 57th Congress, 1st Session. Senate Document No. 123. Washington, 1902.

3. Interoceanic Communication on the Western Continent. By Colonel G. E. Church. 'The Geographical Journal,' vol. xix, No. 3. London: Royal Geographical Society, 1902.

4. The Panama Canal. By J. C. Rodrigues. London: Sampson Low, 1885.

5. The Panama Canal Question: a plea for Columbia. By Abelardo Aldanha, Consul of Columbia. Cardiff: Western Mail Office, 1903.

6. The Interoceanic Canal of Nicaragua, its history, &c. Nicaragua Canal, an account of explorations and surveys, &c. Nicaragua Canal, report on prospective tonnage of traffic. Pamphlets published by the Nicaragua Canal Construction Company, New York, 1890. And other works.

FROM the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn a practically continuous mountain barrier separates the Atlantic from the Pacific. For four hundred years civilised man has been trying to find a way through, or to force a way over, that barrier. Across the northern continent the barrier has been surmounted by several railways; and in the southern continent the iron road is even now steadily ascending the Andes. But the 'secret of the Vol. 200.-No. 400.

Strait,' which the Spaniards sent out countless conquistadores to discover at the Isthmus, has never been discovered; and therefore America is now piercing Panama, as Lesseps pierced Suez. But with this differenceLesseps practically restored a waterway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea that Rameses had cut and the Pharaohs had used ages ago; at Panama American engineers are cutting a way through a tropical mountain region which has never been opened before, which Lesseps expended sixty millions on failing to penetrate, and which many engineers have declared it to be impossible to cut. In modern mechanics, however, the word 'impossible' has no place; and within a few years the siren of the 10,000-ton liner will hoot over the Culebra range. The prospect of the realisation of the dream of ages is, indeed, so near that it behoves us as a maritime nation and a commercial people to consider, even now, what this waterway means, and what effect it will have upon our shipping and sea commerce. It is no longer an engineering speculation by French financiers that we have to contemplate, but a definite national enterprise undertaken by the most practical nation in the world.

One hundred years before Le Maire and Schouten rounded Cape Horn, Pedrarias Davila was exploiting and devastating the Castilla del Oro, which we now call the Isthmus of Panama. The town of that name, when the Spaniards reached the Isthmus, was but a small hamlet of mud-huts on the shore of the Pacific. This fishing hamlet the Spaniards converted into their most important city in the west. They built a wall round it, guarded it with forts, and made it the chief storehouse of the treasures they collected for shipment to Spain. It has to-day a population of 25,000 inhabitants; and its port is visited annually by many hundreds of vessels. It is a city close upon four hundred years old; whereas Colon, on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, was founded only in the middle of the last century. The Isthmus itself is about 400 miles long and contains an area of 31,570 square miles, bounded on the north by Costa Rica, on the south by the Atrato River, on the west by the Pacific, and on the east by the Caribbean Sea. There is little doubt that once upon a time the Caribbean Sea and the

Pacific Ocean were connected, and that the high lands of Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua were then islands in a mid-ocean archipelago. This geological archipelago is now, so far as Panama is concerned, a dense tropical jungle, scored by torrential rivers, and reputed to be endowed with the worst climate in the world. The climate, however, is not so bad as has been represented and the immense death-rate of the Lesseps period was due to the malarial influences set free by the cutting of the surface soil, and to the improvidence of the invading whites. On the Isthmus the summit-level of the mountain barrier is only 300 feet above the sea level, and from its slopes 326 rivers flow into the Pacific and 149 into the Atlantic. In the days of Pedrarias Davila the Isthmus had an estimated population of 2,000,000 Indians. It has now a mixed population of some 300,000 Spaniards, Indians, negroes, Europeans, and Americans.

The discovery of the Atlantic coast-line from Florida northwards was the result of the search for the western passage to the Indian Ocean; and from that coast-line are now streaming down the capital and the material, the machinery and the brains, for the construction of the waterway which the Spaniards were unable to discover as the gift of Nature. Once again is Panama to be made the great highway of trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as when the Spanish galleons landed their cargoes for the west coast at Puertobello, near what is now Colon, and waited there for the produce of Chile and Peru; and as when the multifarious crowd of goldseekers and their followers, panting after the treasures of California, found the quickest route to the goldfields along the track which the Spaniards had made across the tropical desert eighteen leagues of misery and curses.'

It is as unnecessary to recall here all the efforts that have been made towards the canalisation of Central America, by way of Panama or Nicaragua, or otherwise, as it is to re-tell the deplorable story of the Lesseps project. Long before the catastrophe, Mr Rodrigues showed, though no Frenchman and few Englishmen hearkened to him at the time, how 'Le Grand Français was either fooled or fooling, or both; how he was forcing on a scheme which had never been properly studied, and

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