A NEW COMMERCIAL MAP
The most rapid change in the commercial map of the world wrought in
centuries will be witnessed during the years following the completion
of the Panama Canal. Cities that heretofore have been mere way
stations on the international routes of trade will grow into rich
centers where the new roads of the commercial world will cross. On the
other hand, cities which in the past have gloried in a trade supremacy
of international recognition will see themselves displaced and their
prestige lost. The readjustment will not be the matter of a day or a
year; even a generation may pass before it is completed; but the
ultimate changes will certainly be greater and more world-encompassing
than anyone now can forecast.
The capture of Constantinople by the Turks was directly responsible
for the discovery of the New World. It cut off the cities of the
Mediterranean from communication with India, and sent Columbus
westward in quest of another passage, which could not be obstructed by
the Mussulman tyrants of the East. At last the Panama Canal is to
afford that passage, and to bring the whole earth into smaller
compass.
Of course, the United States will be the first to realize the great
benefits of the canal. It will double the efficiency of the American
Navy by permitting it to concentrate its forces on either ocean in
shorter time, by weeks, than can be done by any other nation;
consequently, it will add to American military prestige throughout the
world. The benefits immediately accruing to the people of the United
States will be as great in a commercial way as in military advantage.
As the capture of Constantinople caused the up-building of many
notable regions through the transformation of international trade
routes, so will the completion of the Panama Canal open up new markets
and new opportunities to the Mississippi Valley, the world's greatest
granary. Its grain and meat products, loading by way of Gulf ports,
can go to the ends of the earth with but little outlay for expensive
rail transportation. It is even probable that the great awakening
incident to the opening of the canal, may hasten the day when the
Lakes-to-the-Gulf waterway will be an accomplished fact and when ships
may load in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Paul, and Minneapolis and
sail directly to the ports of the world, thus beginning an era of
commercial development surpassing even the wonderful growth of the
half century just closed.
Pittsburgh may then be able to send its tremendous output of
manufactures to all parts of the world without transhipment; Kansas
City will feel the stimulus of the new waterway; and the Pacific
coast, long cut off from the eastern section of the United States by
high mountain barriers that have been only partially overcome by
railroads, will find its great resources within marketable distance of
the Eastern States.
Canada, too, will feel the stimulus of the canal. No longer will its
great crops have to find their slow outlet over railroads that must
cross the backbone of a continent, but, pursuing the avenues of least
resistance, they may move to all parts of the world by way of the
Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.
South America will greatly benefit by the completion of the canal.
Already its west coast countries and cities are getting ready for the
boom of business that is to follow. Brought thousands of miles nearer
to all western trade centers--so close that their raw products and
American manufactured products can be exchanged to advantage--there
will be a growth of trade whose prospect already has awakened the
lethargic South American to the possibilities ahead.
These possibilities well may be considered by the business men of the
United States. To-day North America buys a large percentage of the
products of South America; but, when the South Americans have money to
spare, they spend only $1 out of $8 in North America--the other $7
goes to Europe. The American exporter will find himself quickened by
the history-making change the canal will produce and, if he goes at it
in earnest, he will be in a position to reverse the present situation
and get $7 of South American trade where Europe gets only $1.
Australia and New Zealand will experience, perhaps, a greater change
in the trade routes than any other countries outside of the Americas.
The Australian commerce now is largely carried by way of Suez. The
opening of the Panama Canal will place New Zealand 1,200 miles nearer
to London than it is by way of Suez, and the eastern ports of
Australia will be as near to England by way of Panama as by Suez. All
Australasian ports will be brought several thousand miles closer to
the Atlantic ports of the United States than they are to-day. No one
who has heard an Australasian complain of the long delays and the
excessive freight rates that intervene between him and his American
shoes, can doubt that the closer proximity of American markets will be
welcomed in that faraway land under the southern cross. Sydney will be
4,000 miles nearer to New York through the Panama Canal, and 5,500
miles nearer to New Orleans and Galveston.
The transcontinental tonnage now handled by the railroads, which
ultimately will go by the canal, aggregates 3,000,000 tons a year. The
seaboard sections of the United States, of course, will benefit more
largely than interior points, for the reason that interior points will
have to take a combined rail-and-water route. This will involve
railroad transportation and transhipment of cargo, also rehandling
charges. After the canal is opened it is probable that the railroads
will prefer to supply the intermountain States directly from eastern
sources, instead of maintaining the existing policy of giving low
rates to Pacific coast cities, so as to give them dominance over the
shipping business of the intermountain region. The total
coast-to-coast traffic of the railroads is said to approximate
one-fifth of the entire traffic carried across the Rocky Mountains.
Only one-third of the through traffic of the transcontinental lines
from the East to the West originates east of a line drawn through
Buffalo and Pittsburgh. It is this third of the westward business that
will be affected mainly by the operation of the canal.
[Illustration: INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING ROUTES]
The principal effect the Panama Canal will have in the readjustment of
the trade map of the world is not, perhaps, as much in changing
existing routes as in creating new avenues of business. In every
region where there is promise of unusual benefit by reason of the
opening of the Panama Canal, an effort is being made to capitalize the
advantages to be derived therefrom. The west coast of South America
feels the stimulus of suddenly being brought thousands of miles closer
to the best markets of the world, and anyone who travels down the
coast from Panama may see at every port signs of a determination to
reap full advantage of the new opportunities.
Even Guayaquil, a city that for years has been a hissing and a byword
to the masters of all ships plying up and down the west coast because
of its absolute indifference to all requirements of sanitation, has
prepared for a campaign of cleaning-up, in order that it may become a
port of call for all the ships passing that way. Heretofore, masters
of ships, in order to comply with quarantine regulations elsewhere,
have given it a wide berth whenever possible.
Chile, Peru, and Ecuador--all three have caught the spirit of the new
era which a completed canal proclaims, and are striving to set their
houses in order for the quickened times they see ahead. With the
Central American Republics it is the same. Handicapped as they are by
revolutions that sap their life-blood, or dominated by rulers who have
no other object in governing the people than to exploit them, these
countries still hope for much from the canal, and new activities are
beginning to spring up in every one of them.
It is not improbable that the canal will play an important part in
transforming the economic situation of the world during the
generations immediately ahead of us. One needs only to study the
distribution of humanity over the countries of the earth to find how
unevenly the population is scattered, and to learn what great tides of
immigration will have to flow westward to establish the equilibrium of
population, which some day is bound to come. When Asia has a
population of 50 per square mile and Europe a population of 100 a
square mile, while North America has 15 and South America has 7, it is
apparent that the future holds great changes in store. The potential
development of the two Americas challenges the imagination. South
America, with its virgin soil all but untouched, can support a
population half as dense as that of Europe. This means that it can
make room for 300,000,000 immigrants. Likewise, it is fair to assume
that North America, with its up-to-date methods of agriculture,
industry, and commerce, can support a population as dense as that of
Asia with its primitive methods of manufacture and agriculture. This
means that North America has room to accommodate 300,000,000 souls. In
other words, room still remains for 600,000,000 persons on the
continents which the Panama Canal divides. When the day comes, as it
seems certain that it will, that the Americas reach their full growth,
even the Panama Canal, larger by far than any other artificial
waterway in the world, will be much too small to accommodate the
traffic which naturally would pass its way.
The foreign trade of the United States with its 90,000,000 of
population, aggregates 60,000,000 tons a year. Assuming that foreign
trade would grow in the same proportion as population, it will be seen
that the foreign trade of the two Americas at a time when the
population of South America becomes half as dense as that of Europe,
and that of North America half as dense as that of Asia, will
approximate 500,000,000 tons. Assuming further that only one-fifth of
this would pass through the canal, the American commerce alone would
exceed its capacity, leaving all the trade between the Orient and
eastern Europe to be taken care of by future enlargements.
More immediate, however, will be the realization of the prophecy of
William H. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, that the Pacific is
destined to become the chief theater of the world's events. As the
population of the earth stands to-day, more than half of all the
people who inhabit the globe dwell on lands which drain into this
greatest of oceans. Yet, in spite of that fact, the trade that sweeps
over the Pacific is but small in comparison with that which traverses
the Atlantic. Where a thousand funnels darken the trade routes of the
Atlantic, a few hundred are seen on the Pacific.
But in Japan one may find an example of the possibilities of the
Pacific in the years to come. When China, with its 400,000,000 people,
awakens as Japan has awakened, and builds up an international trade in
proportion to that of Japan, it will send a commerce across the seas
unprecedented in volume. When it buys and sells as Japan buys and
sells, the waters of the Orient will vie with those of the Occident in
the size of their fleets of commerce.
The opening of the Panama Canal promises to be one of the factors in
hastening the day when the Orient will become as progressive as the
Occident, and when sleeping nations will arise from their lethargy and
contribute uncounted millions of tons of traffic to the Pacific Ocean,
making it a chief theater of commerce as well as of world events.
In our own country the course of empire has been sweeping toward the
Pacific. Where once the center of most things lay east of the
Mississippi River, now we find its agriculture, its mining industries,
and its commercial activities gradually moving westward. The center of
cotton production, once in those States celebrated in the melodies of
the Southern plantation, has moved westward and to-day in Texas,
Oklahoma, and even Southern California, cotton is grown in a way which
shows that King Cotton has caught the spirit of the age and is
extending his territories westward toward the Pacific. And all of this
means a growing business and an expanding traffic through the Panama
Canal.
On the Atlantic side there are signs without number that many nations
will be up and doing in the reformation of the commercial map of the
world. The islands of the Caribbean form a screen around the Atlantic
end of the canal, and the majority of them are British possessions.
Many of their cities will be situated upon the new international trade
routes that will be called into being by the opening of the Panama
Canal. At Kingston, Jamaica, great improvements are projected, coaling
stations are planned, and other steps are being taken which will
enable the British Government to reap what advantage it can from the
construction of the canal. With its splendid diversity of climate,
brought about by the wide range of elevated land, the fruits of the
temperate zones may be grown, as well as those of the Tropics, and, as
John Foster Fraser expresses it, Jamaica may become the orchard of
Great Britain.
Denmark is planning extensive shipping facilities in its beautiful
harbor of Charlotte Amalia on the Island of St. Thomas. This island,
which commands one of the principal passages from the Atlantic to the
Caribbean Sea, might to-day be a possession of the United States had
this Government been willing to buy it when Denmark was anxious to
sell. It was here that the bold pirates of the _Spanish Main_ hid
their crews in the all but landlocked harbor, and waited for the
shipping which passed through Mona passage. Here Bluebeard's castle
still stands a mute reminder of the romantic days when buccaneers
dominated the _Spanish Main_.
The north coast of South America also expects to figure largely in the
new commercial map. The northern cities of Venezuela are on the route
from eastern South America through the canal, and on one of the
natural routes from Pacific ports to Europe. Nowhere else in the world
will one find a more delightful climate or a more picturesque city or
scenery than in northern Venezuela. Caracas, the capital, is but two
hours' ride from the port of La Guaira, and less than a day's journey
from Puerto Cabello, and, while the commerce which may be developed in
Venezuela will, for the most part, find its outlet to the sea through
the Orinoco River, La Guaira and Puerto Cabello will always prove
attractive ports of call for passenger-carrying ships.
The changes in the commercial situation of Asia and the Americas,
brought about by the opening of the canal, will be many. There will be
a sudden readjustment of existing trade routes and this will be
followed by a long era of development of new conditions, which will be
so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, and yet so immense as to
excite the wonder of humanity when it stops to reckon its full effect
and meaning.