THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA
_Canal Entrance--Colon in Architectural Transformation--Unchanging
Climate--Historic Waterway Routes--Columbus and the
Early Explorers--Darien and San Blas--East and West
Directions--Life along the Railway--Chagres River and Culebra
Cut--Three Panamas--Pacific Mouth of the Canal--Functions
of the Republic--Natural Resources--Agriculture and
Timber--Road-building--United States Authority on the Zone--Labor
and Laborers--Misleading Comparisons with Cuba--The First Year’s
Experience._
[Illustration:
GENERAL PLAN
OF THE
PANAMA CANAL
From the plans of the Panama Canal Company]
When the Caribbean is restive, restless is the voyager. After
tossing in misery one April night I peered through the port-hole of
the steamer’s cabin at what seemed a cluster of swinging lanterns
dipping into the sea. They were the lights of Colon. The vessel
was riding at anchor to await the morning hour when the approach
to the quays could be made.
Daybreak unfolded through the mist, disclosing green foliage ridges
and broken forest-clad hills sloping to a shallow bowl. This circular
basin is the island of Manzanillo. The town lies as in the bottom
of a saucer. Colon is not a harbor in the usual sense, for the
curving Bay of Limon which it fringes is an open roadstead. The
improvements by the United States will make it a commercial haven.
For all the years to come the blue horizon will be swept by the
eager eye of the traveller for the Canal entrance. Seen from the
ship’s deck, it is like the smooth surface of a sluggish river,
broad and open. The artistic instinct of the French engineers found
expression even in the prosaic work of earth excavation. They planted
a village in the midst of cocoanut groves, and the palm-thatched
cottages charm the eye. The bronze group of Columbus and the Indian,
Empress Eugenie’s gift, allegorical of the enlightenment of the
New World, may be seen through glasses, while the showy residence
built for De Lesseps is discerned.
[Illustration: The De Lesseps House, Colon]
Little is noted of the town till the wharves are approached.
There is a group of warehouses, a glimpse of railroad yards, a
conglomeration of frame houses with peaked roofs and outside
balconies and stairways, and then swamps, marshes, and hills beyond.
The great transatlantic liners stretched along the docks are far
more imposing than the port town itself.
Ashore, the frame structures give an impression of all that is
temporary and unsubstantial. Some have been streaked with deep
indigo blue, but the sun and the salt air have worn the pigment to
a faded azure. Colon has little that is typically and traditionally
Spanish, because when the insurgents burned it in 1885 they left
only a few brick and mortar buildings. The town which then sprang
up was built with economy in view, though pine lumber was not very
cheap. The newer city which gradually will replace the aggregation
of shanties will be more substantial and more like a permanent
seaport. The Gothic brownstone church in which the Jamaica negroes
and the whites who profess the Anglican form of faith worship,
is the one edifice in Colon that in the transformation should be
allowed to remain.
The cocoanut grove in front of the hotel, facing the Caribbean,
is a pretty bit of landscape, and the statue erected to William
H. Aspinwall, John L. Stephens, and Henry Chauncey, associates in
the building of the Panama Railroad, if not a monument of taste,
at least serves a praiseworthy purpose as a tribute to indomitable
American enterprise. Ornate homes, tropical in the extreme, line
the sea-front, but the residence district is a very limited one
and will remain so until the swamp is filled in and the marshes
cleared away. Colon may be regarded as in the process of hygienic
architectural transition, and its lack of attractiveness need not be
deplored. The work of reconstruction would be immensely facilitated
if another fire could sweep across the marshes and leave nothing
but the brownstone church, the hotel, and the wharves.
Colon is the most typically cosmopolitan place upon the Isthmus, and
will continue so until the world’s commerce begins to flow through
the waterway. Then the city of Panama will share with it in this
respect. But Panama does not have in so full a degree the European
mixture as Colon, for the crews of the transatlantic vessels seldom
get across to the Pacific port. In all the mingling of tongues in
Colon--German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, dialect Indian,
Greek, Swedish, and many varieties of English--nothing is so mellow
and so distressing in whining intonation as the broad cockney accent
of the Jamaica blacks.
The work accomplished by the Panama Railroad Company, hygienically
and otherwise, serves as a basis for the physical regeneration of
Colon which must accompany the Canal construction. Its provisions
for its employees, its hospitals, and its general sanitary
regulations were so well conceived and carried out that their
value as an example and a precedent is very great. The engineering
problem is comparatively simple. It is to raise the level of the
island of Manzanillo, and then to provide sanitary conveniences
and enforce hygienic principles both for the community and for the
individual. The question of water supply is one of gathering the
plentiful showers of heaven in cisterns and distilling them. A
system of waterworks which will bring pure water from the springs
of the Cordillera is not impracticable.
Colon is hot and humid. Its climate cannot be modified by artificial
devices. During the dry season, which is from April to July, the
mean temperature is nearly 90° Fahrenheit in the shade, while in
the sun it is 110°. The humidity is about 77 per cent. In the
rainy season the mean temperature is 85°, and the humidity varies
from 86 per cent to complete saturation. The annual rainfall is
seldom less than 125 inches. A man six feet in stature standing on
the shoulders of another man of equal height, would just about be
able to keep his shoulders above water if the two were placed in
a reservoir which would catch and hold the entire rainfall of the
year. But in spite of heat and humidity and precipitated moisture,
existence can be made passably comfortable.
As the traveller takes his way across the Isthmus, he may wish also
to view in retrospect the waterways that have been conceived in
the brains of men who were ahead of their times, and the paths of
trade and travel that have been followed; for now, in the presence
of actual construction along a determined course, these pioneer
routes quickly fade into oblivion.
The projects have been many. They were to unlock the key of the
universe and to throw open a gateway to the Pacific. Columbus
explored the Mosquito coast in search of the passage to the Indies,
and thought he had found another Ganges, though the strait which
he sought was obstinate in hiding itself. He planned colonies at
the Gulf of Uraba, or Darien. Balboa and his companions, among
whom was Pizarro, from near the same place, 200 miles east of the
Chagres, hewed their way through tropical forest jungle and over
mountains till they reached the summit of Piuri, from which they
saw the Pacific and named the ocean inlet San Miguel Bay in honor
of St. Michael. A few years later Balboa had “the little boats”
carried over this path from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Long
afterward, more than a century and a half, Sir John Morgan led his
loyal buccaneers in Balboa’s footprints to the bloody sacking of
the opulent city of Panama.
But the early Spaniards found a shorter route for their traffic.
At different periods the Chagres was followed from its mouth till
within twenty miles of Panama, and then the jungle was pierced by
paths. Yet this was not the _camino real_, or king’s highway. That
royal road was a cobble-paved mule trail from Portobello, twenty
miles east of what is now Colon, to Santes on the upper Chagres,
and thence to Panama. This is the route over which the traffic
passed for two centuries. The land trails could be tested. The canal
courses could only be dreamed or projected in the imagination.
Of the three interoceanic routes which have become historic, the
early explorers, Spanish and Portuguese, thought most of the Darien
or Caledonian cross-cut channel. It was to start north of the Gulf
of Darien, near the bay which afterward became known as Caledonian
Bay, and follow a general direction southwest to the Pacific.
Señor Don Angel Savedro, one of the first petitioners to Charles
V for an interoceanic waterway, had this general direction in his
mind. This was the route advocated by the Scotch banker, William
Patterson, in his broad scheme for Great Britain to save control
of the Antilles, by seizing Havana, acquiring the Isthmus, and
constructing an isthmian canal in order to carry the blessings of
commerce and civilization to the Sandwich Islands.
During the nineteenth century the Darien general route was no less
earnestly advocated than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and the mythical low level had many believers. Frederick M. Kelley,
the New York banker, who gave fortune and a life’s ambition to the
project of an interoceanic waterway, also based his hopes on the
Darien route. It required the explorations of Commander Selfridge and
subsequent American expeditions, as well as the investigations of
Reclus and Wyse for the French company, to dissipate the unfounded
hopes regarding Darien.
The San Blas route, being the shortest, should have had more
advocates, for it is only thirty-one miles across from ocean to
ocean, but the solid mountain wall of the Cordillera discouraged
most of the early explorers. Its merits and demerits were made
familiar to the public through the discussions in Congress.
It was of the upper Chagres route that the intrepid Frenchman,
Champlain, whose voyage to the West Indies and the Isthmus in 1602
seems to be historically established, wrote: “At Panama is a little
river which rises in the mountains and descends to Porte Bello,
which river is four leagues from Panama ... and being embarked
on the said river there are but eighteen leagues to Porte Bello.
One may judge that if the four leagues of land which there are
from Panama to this river were cut through, one might pass from
the South Sea to the ocean on the other side and thus shorten the
route by more than 1,500 leagues; and from Panama to the Straits of
Magellan would be an island, and from Panama to the Newfoundlands
would be another island, so that the whole of America would be in
two islands.”
The Raspadura channel, by which the Jesuit Fathers were said to
have made the passage from ocean to ocean in canoes with a very
short portage, lacks historical verification.
The Chagres route was included in the broad vision of the future
which Lopez de Guevara had in the middle of the sixteenth century.
The realization of his dreams may be for the twenty-fifth century.
He proposed the union of the two oceans by three canals opening in
three points,--the Chagres in Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec.
Before following the jungle-screened railway line or tracing
the course of the Canal with its luxurious border of tropical
vegetation, it is desirable to clear away geographical confusion.
The Isthmus of Panama extends almost directly east and west. It is
the contour of the two continents as formed by a neck not simply
awry but completely twisted,--in popular language, a gooseneck.
The entire West Coast of South America, except a slight bulge near
the Equator, lies east of the longitude of Cleveland, Ohio. Panama
City is about on the north and south line with Pittsburg. It is
southeast of Colon, and the general direction of the Canal from
the Atlantic entrance, therefore, will be southeast.
The route selected by the French engineers, and which with some
variation will be continued by the United States, does not need
detailed description. The course of the Canal can be observed in
the railroad journey to Gatun, where the first view is had of the
defiant Chagres fed by its twenty-one tributaries. I have seen
the Chagres a tame, sleeping brook, losing itself in the tropical
jungle or the narrow gorges, and again have looked on it when it
was a wild, resistless torrent. The engineering problems never can
be fully appreciated until one has seen the Chagres sweeping on in
its conquering career.
Native customs and the mixed life of Canal construction are seen at
the stations along the railway. Every village has its collection
of parrots and monkeys. The sights differ from the scenes in other
parts of the Isthmus, because of this intermingling of foreigners,
largely Chinese and Jamaican. But the inhabitants are so markedly
of the local type that they may be easily distinguished from the
foreign mixture. The aboriginal Indian race, of which there are
various branches, forms a third of the inhabitants. The Panameñan is
about three-fourths Indian blood and one-fourth Spanish, although
farther away from the Canal Zone a very strong negro element
exists, due to the introduction of African slavery by the early
Spaniards. The natives, from their familiarity with the jungles
and their ability to withstand the hardships of the climate and the
exposure, are useful principally to the exploring parties and the
pioneering expeditions. They are too indolent for the actual work
of excavation.
The Culebra Cut is not seen to full advantage from the railway,
yet a fair idea may be obtained of the task involved in cutting
the spine of the Cordillera or the Continental Divide at this the
lowest depression, 272 feet. The excavation and removal of the
material from this section is said to be the controlling factor in
the Canal construction. The valley with the city of Panama huddled
at the foot of Mt. Ancon, and Taboga Isle in the bay, are seen to
advantage from Culebra.
There are three Panamas. One is primitive Panama, in jungle-covered
ruins, a few miles from the present port. This was the city whose
opulence was the envy of the world until its treasures awakened the
greed of Morgan and his fellow freebooters and became their spoil.
Then the new town was built and fortified. It is gloriously mediæval
with all its Spanish and Moorish buildings, its cluster of emerald
rocks in the bay, its high tides and its mixed nationalities, with
little Italy and modernized China side by side. But the present
Panama attracts only at a distance, and will be attractive only at
a distance until modern sanitation can be installed and some of
its picturesqueness be destroyed in the interests of public and
private hygiene.
Rivalry exists between Panama and Colon over their relative climatic
attractions. Panama is much drier than the Caribbean seaport, the
annual rainfall usually being not more than 70 inches and the
humidity of the atmosphere not so great. But 90° Fahrenheit in
the shade is the average mean temperature, and the humidity is
penetrating enough to serve all practical purposes of discomfort.
The new Panama is at La Boca, the Pacific mouth of the Canal. This is
the railway terminus, and it is there the United States authorities
created the port of Ancon and then abandoned the plan of collecting
customs duties in competition with the Isthmian Republic. Wharves
are located there, and for shipping the place offers some advantages
over the port of Panama. The present Panama with its population of
25,000 is congested. Its old buildings are overcrowded. They are
solid, substantial, and will last for centuries yet; but the natural
movement of population, especially in view of the enormous rents
demanded in Panama, will be to seek the new city which will grow
up as a frame town with elements of stability. Much business is
certain to drift to the Canal mouth, some of it in American hands.
The mercantile community in the days when Colombia controlled the
Isthmus was anything but Colombian. It was West Indian, Italian,
Chinese, German, French, American, and English. It is the same
to-day and will be the same to-morrow.
The United States is the paramount authority on the Isthmus, the
control of the Canal Zone making it such, and its duty to itself
and its responsibility to the world could be discharged in no other
way. Yet there is also the government of the Republic of Panama,--a
protected commonwealth. All that needs to be understood is Article
I of the Hay-Varilla Treaty. This says that the United States
guarantees and will maintain the independence of the Republic of
Panama.
In its political relations the Spanish term may be adopted, and the
Republic may be said to be “in function” within the sphere of the
United States. I omit particulars of the governmental system in
order to examine the industrial resources and prospects. Details of
administration are unnecessary, because the authority exercised by
the American officials in the Canal Zone, and the supervising power
over sanitation in Colon and Panama, take the subject out of its
local limitations. The liberality shown by President Roosevelt’s
administration in adjusting the jurisdiction of the United States
on the broad lines laid down by Secretary Taft, left the Panama
government free to work out its commercial and industrial growth
through its own measures and to the full extent of its own abilities
as a commonwealth. A full account of fiscal policy may be omitted,
with the general statement that international traffic in transit
as taxed by port dues is not subjected to heavy burdens, while the
imposts on domestic trade are not severe. While a tariff in the
protective sense may not be said to exist, the system of _ad valorem_
valuations secures a customs revenue which places all merchandise
under tribute. Internal taxation has many forms, modelled, as it is,
after the Spanish system. In addition the income from the $10,000,000
received from the United States assures that the government will
continue to be a “going” concern, in practical operation as well
as in legal phraseology.
For the student of political institutions the interest is in
the moulding of the inheritance of Spanish laws and Spanish
administrative system to American models and the influence of an
environment so pronounced as the American control of the Canal
Zone. The evolution of the civic spirit, instead of being under the
shadow of an unfriendly Power, is in the sunshine of a big genial
Republic.
In its soil of decayed vegetation the Isthmus, with an area equal to
the State of Indiana, has natural wealth enough for the subsistence
of a continent. But it is tropical natural wealth, much of which
exists under conditions unfavorable for development. Timber
exploitation may one day open the longitudinal path eastward from
the Canal Zone through the health-destroying jungles to the Gulf
of Darien. Mahogany and others of the precious hardwoods offer the
temptation. But the trail will be blazed slowly, a score or so of
miles each decade. The mineral deposits also lie to the east. They
will aid in the conquering of this hitherto unconquered region,
yet gradually.
[Illustration: Caribbean Cocoa Palms]
The territory which will be developed most rapidly is that lying
principally west of the Canal Zone and extending to the limits of
Costa Rica. Tropical agriculture in the hands of natives of the
temperate countries is entirely practicable in this region, much
of which has a climate markedly superior to the belt lying between
Colon and Panama in the valleys of the Chagres and the Grand Rivers.
The fruit industry, and in particular banana culture, has made
rapid strides, but its possibilities are only in their beginning.
Coffee cultivation was becoming a profitable business until the
political disturbances ruined it. The revival may be expected
within the five years necessary to bring the trees to the point of
commercial production. Ivory nuts, rubber, and the infinite variety
of minor tropical products will be stimulated by the market that
will be opened. In the extreme west along the Pacific slope, where
grazing has been enough of an agricultural industry to create the
flourishing town of David, an enduring basis will be given to the
live-stock industry.
But none of this agricultural growth can precede the building
of roads. These are totally lacking in the interior. The Panama
government made sensible provision out of its first revenues for
this form of internal improvement, and the policy may be looked upon
as a continuous one. The railroad line of development will be from
Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic slope to David on the Pacific coast.
Bocas del Toro will reach the Canal Zone by a railway through the
banana-producing lands, and David in time may be connected with
Panama.
In the general sense the prosperity of the Isthmus for many years
depends more on the excavation work and on the international commerce
than on its internal resources. It is this which will swell the
trade of $2,000,000 or $2,500,000 annually to greater figures.
Yet the waterway is the sure harbinger of the exploitation of the
productive founts. The Canal community and the Canal construction
are the potent economic factors.
When all is said, the Zone is the thing. The laws administered may
not in their entirety be American laws, but they are such in spirit.
Actually, the Canal Zone is a semi-military camp. It must continue
such for purposes of sanitation and law and order during the entire
period of Canal construction. What follows is the establishment
of a colony within the Republic of Panama, yet not of it. This
colony, which includes laborers, civilian officials, occasional
detachments of marines, and a police force, is not apt at any time
greatly to exceed 25,000 persons. The early estimates of the very
large number of laborers who would be required were reduced when the
engineers began to make closer study of the degree to which improved
machinery could be used in the excavation and other work. It will
be a conglomerate mass,--Jamaican and other West Indian negroes,
Chinese coolies, Mexican and Central American peons, possibly a few
American blacks, Italian railway workers, and similar elements. In
spite of all scepticism and detraction, the Jamaica and Barbadoes
negroes will do the bulk of the work on the Canal. They did the
most of what was accomplished by the French company. They built the
railroads along the unhealthy coast of Costa Rica. They have shown
the greatest adaptability to the climate and the best capacity for
hard labor. The Panama Canal will be the monumental contribution
of the despised black race to civilization.
[Illustration: Panama Natives from the Swamp Country]
[Illustration: Panama Natives from the Mountains]
Aside from determining the engineering conditions of the Canal, which
I have no purpose of discussing in this volume, the most important
functions of the United States on the Isthmus are in regulating
sanitation and hygiene. This regulation could not be restricted
merely to the inhabitants of the Canal Zone, for to guard them
against epidemics Colon and Panama had to be protected.
I never shared the enthusiasm over the rose-colored comparisons
of the region lying between Colon and Panama with Havana and
Cuba. Measures of hygiene, public sanitation, and even individual
cleanliness will be secured on the Canal Zone and in the seaport
cities. This will be valuable in decreasing the danger from yellow
fever, bubonic plague, or other epidemics. And it also may be
assumed that the strict supervision given by the medical officers
will in a measure serve as a preventive against dysentery and
enteric diseases, which are common to the tropics and especially so
to the moist lands. But the Canal Zone topographically is vastly
different from the island of Cuba. The Atlantic Ocean sweeps across
Cuba. Every day of the year a healthful breeze is felt in the great
central belt of that island. This not only purifies the northern
coast, but it also invigorates the interior region, and its effect
is felt even on the south coast. But in the Canal belt are the
dead calms of the Pacific on one side and the limited area of the
Caribbean winds on the other side. The Atlantic breezes are lost in
the marshes before they reach the ridge of the Cordillera, while
the zephyr which sometimes springs up in the Bay of Panama rarely
extends as far as the Culebra Cut. When the Canal is completed, it
will not serve as a tube through which the breezes of one ocean
will whistle to the other ocean.
I write these opinions without the purpose of opening a controversy
with enthusiastic scientists, medical officers, or meteorologists,
but merely as a statement of climatic conditions which cannot be
changed by the agency of man. There is the peculiar configuration
of the Cordillera that causes the moist blankets to hang over the
Isthmus and precipitates the enormous quantities of rain. Cuba has
its wet season during certain months, but these rains are normal
phenomena and are not supercharged with disease.
Miasma must result from the excavation of the decayed vegetation
of a thousand years which constitutes the waterway line with the
exception of the Culebra Cut, and yet the central belt of the
Isthmus has enough of pernicious malaria even with the earth
undisturbed. Experiences at Havana and elsewhere will be utilized,
and the mosquito, if not exterminated, will have its harmfulness
curbed. Whatever can be accomplished by artificial means to combat
disease-breeding Nature will be accomplished, and no doubt need be
felt regarding the efficiency of the sanitary corps as organized
under the Canal Commission. But when all is not simply said but
done, it comes to this: the inherent unhealthy conditions of the
Canal Zone will be reduced to a minimum. The climate will not be
conquered. What may happen will be to reconcile it to the presence
of a larger number of inhabitants than the region heretofore has
had.
For those who will dwell and work on the Isthmus the suggestions of
the sanitary corps are so complete that I can add nothing except to
advise to follow these instructions and to take a vacation either
to the healthful mountains of Costa Rica or down the Pacific coast
or back home as often as possible. The population which will be
living in the Canal Zone for the next twenty years in relation to
health is to be taken in the mass, and the experiences of a few
individuals who have been able to regulate their own occupations with
a special view to conserving their strength are not to be accepted
as applying to thousands of other individuals. Nor is the result
of a few months’ life on the Isthmus in its effect on the human
energies to be accepted as the index of what may be expected after
several years, during which the mental and the physical faculties
are concentrated on one task.
The lessons of the first year’s experience are easily learned. In
the beginning was the buoyant, hopeful American temperament which
goes straight forward to the task and, once determined that it
shall be done, takes no note of obstacles. The Canal never would be
built if the spirit of pessimism obtained at the outset. Optimism
is always better in a great national undertaking. A large number
of cheerful and confident Americans flocked to the Isthmus to fill
positions in the engineering, the clerical, the sanitary departments
and on the railroad. That there were confusion and cross-purposes
in administration and complaint of red tape was not important.
Actually the Washington authorities cut far more of the red tape
than ordinarily can be done safely in government enterprises. But
within a few months loud complaints were heard about low wages,
the high cost of living, the long hours of labor, and the lack of
recreation and amusement. Then the discouraged employees began to
come home. They were of two classes. Many of the early home-comers
were the adventurous fellows who had gone to Panama wanting a new
experience and having had it more rapidly than they had anticipated,
returned to spread the discontent. There was the other, and perhaps
the more numerous, class who had gone in good faith, expecting to
find conditions as to health and personal comfort similar to the
United States, and intending to stay. It is likely, too, that both
classes, working as they were for the government, expected easier
conditions than would obtain in private employment.
The unvarying tendency of the returning employees was to discredit
the glowing official and semi-official reports which had been
made, and the promises held out of immunity from even the common
ailments, including lassitude and homesickness. Then came the yellow
fever epidemic of the Summer of 1905 and the long period during
which the health authorities were baffled in locating the focus of
infection. There was also the disagreeable evidence that pernicious
malaria had had time to work havoc in many strong constitutions.
The picture of the panic-stricken groups struggling to get away
from Colon with every vessel may have been a little overdrawn, but
that the feeling throughout the Isthmus was one of illy suppressed
and contagious terror was undeniable. Yet to those experienced
in tropical diseases the mortality was not an excessive one, nor
were the general health conditions bad, allowance being made for
surroundings. The permanent hospital records and vital statistics
unquestionably will show that wonders were really worked under a
scientific and systematic sanitation and provisions for conserving
the health of employees. But the medical officials in their spirit
of hopefulness had predicted freedom from the inevitable diseases of
the Isthmus of Panama, and the failure of their prophecies caused
the disappointing results to be exaggerated.
[Illustration: Ruins at Panama]
Generally, during the first year the United States suffered
from too much expert opinion and advice regarding engineering
and administrative work of the Canal and too little practical
application to the task in hand. This was not true of the
sanitary authorities, who worked harmoniously and effectively. If
only they had been more conservative in their original statements,
it would have been better for their reputations as prophets of
health. It always is to be remembered that ditch-digging in the
most humid and rainiest section of the tropics cannot be made an
entirely healthful occupation, and as fast as the subsoil is turned
up by the steam-shovel the earth’s resentment at being disturbed
will make itself felt. The procurement of the permanent class of
employees and laborers with the physical stamina and the moral fibre
which the work of Canal construction requires, is necessarily an
evolution and not the creation of a single year. But that class
will be evolved, and the undertaking will go forward.
My own point of view is twofold. The Canal insures the industrial
development of the Isthmus of Panama along the lines of tropical
agriculture. It creates an international commerce and it adds to the
domestic trade. It will secure an increased permanent population to
replace the army of construction when the work of excavation shall
be completed. This is the certainty in relation to the resources
and the people. It will be good for Panama. But there is a wider
good which is not local. For ten or twenty years the Canal will be
a training-school in which to test and strengthen the constructive
energy of the American character. Nowhere will the initiative
faculty make greater demands on the individual. For those “who die
victorious” the tribute of Time will be the completed Canal. For
those who live the task will be from year to year out of their
abundant experience to help on the industrial development of
adjacent lands, among them the West Coast countries. And that is
the civilization which will sweep from the Atlantic through the
Canal and down the Pacific.