CHAPTER XIV THE CANAL
They tease the American children born in the Canal Zone and call them "speakity babies," but the same children, when they grow up a little, are proud of their birthplace and say—
"I'm a Calzone boy!"
"I'm a Calzone girl!"
And there's a crowd of them, a real new generation of imperial Americans rising in health and pride from what was once jungle and pestilence—the "white man's grave."
The Spanish Negro natives, now generally called "Spigs," are slow to learn English, and to what they learn they commonly add the letter "y" thus, "Me no carey for you." And their commonest remark to an American is—"Me no speakity English." Hence "speakity babies" and "Speakities"—the word has come to stay.
"Calzone," which vaguely suggests to the mind undergarments, is very suitable to a swimming population and to those who live in a latitude of steam and heat, but is after all only a derivative from "Canal Zone." But "Calzone" also has perhaps entered the language.
The children of the Canal Zone are numerous. Almost the chief characteristic of the ten-mile-wide strip of the territory is the children. This is first of all due to God and the Government. The United States Government has from the first encouraged the Canal employees to marry; has given rent-free houses to married couples, and generally made it more comfortable for a married man living there with his wife than for the bachelor. The bachelor is always thinking of vacations "back home"; the married man identifies home with the place where he sees his wife and children. The Zone, therefore, is practically settled by people who are at home.
That does not entirely account for the swarms of children. Families are unusually large. There is room for children to kick about in; children fill a larger place in the affections. And then, as a doctor explained to me, "the American woman, tending rather to sterility in the North, is much more fruitful in the Tropics."
"You cannot raise children in India," said he. "But we can in Panama. Do but look around!"
The children are muscular, uncommonly active in wrestling and fighting and leaping and swimming. They afford a surprising contrast to their parents, who show some marks of climate. The children run and struggle with one another and are not annoyed by their profuse perspiration. The parents sit and watch the thousand beads of moisture forming on their bare arms. The parents do not stir but to take a cab; the children chase hoops and hop along with scooters. Certainly the children show a surprising development—many of them learn to dive and swim at four years old, but at nine years you'll sometimes see boys and girls with limbs surprisingly hairy. Children also reach maturity earlier than in the North, and perhaps this brilliant rising generation of Calzones will be as pale and passive as the grown-ups by the time they are thirty.
"There are men here who have missed many ships," I was told. They book a berth, and then, when the time comes, forget; go to the Shipping Company's office and exchange for a berth on the next ship, and then forget again.
Most army and naval officers carry notebooks to aid their memories on routine. Apathy, listlessness, no doubt, is the chief danger in Panama, and that being a spiritual danger it is more to be regarded than the material danger of disease. You notice the difference when you arrive in Panama from the North. You stride, you rush, you soak out your clothes with perspiration, you overtake everybody, you hustle the shop keepers, drink a whole glass in a bar whilst your neighbor has merely sipped. You are completely out of step. Then you pause and reflect; you decide to slow down, and the heat does the rest; you are soon going as slowly as any man who has missed ships.
Nevertheless the American flag does not wave listlessly. The Stars and Stripes is no jungle flag. It is the flag of business, of hustle, of enterprise. It will not droop in the tropics but lift to the trade. Whilst the climate slows down the Anglo-Saxon American it can never slow him down to the level of the Spanish-American. The Panamanians and the "Spigs," the lighter and the darker Spaniards, breeds, half-breeds, or forest-mongrels, have had all nationhood sweated out of them. They claim no affiliations with Spain or with anything bigger than themselves. But the Americans of the Zone are one with a hundred million of kith and kin, one with the Union of forty-eight States, one with their President and with the New York Times and with the Army which is always with them, and with the Navy which comes and goes.
The Calzone people are prouder of America than are most Americans who live in the States themselves. They are like the British Colonials, the Australians, the Jamaicans, and the rest, who are prouder of the Union Jack than those who
. . . think their Empire still
Is the Bank and Holborn Hill.
Curiously enough, the United States is fast becoming a Mother Country, and those who were originally colonists are becoming "home people" having colonial kith and kin of their own.
The Stars and Stripes at the Panama Canal has become the flag of Empire. It is the flag flying at the outposts of English-speaking America. It is more rousing and significant there than anywhere else at this time. It may droop at Washington; it may look ridiculous in the hands of Mr. Babbitt; but at Panama it is the flag of America's inevitable destiny, the flag of her sway and of the triumph of her language, her character, and her business.
Even the mere commercial mind has grasped something of the significance of the Panama Canal. It is the greatest advertisement of America in the world. Its construction was a super-human task, and its achievement shed a light of glory on those who carried it through. It is true that the French started the work and failed, and that Ferdinand de Lesseps and the French nation have grandiose monuments erected to them in Panama City. Frenchmen say Lesseps failed for lack of capital, but every one who has studied the work of the French there has understood that the French could never have succeeded in cutting through the Isthmus. It was not only capital the French lacked, but character and imagination. America began her great national task in a spirit of human kindness by a magnificent effort to save the health of the workers. She made the Canal, but she overcame the forces of death first. She overcame the idea of the white man's grave. She rolled away the stone from the sepulchre.
What was one of the most pestilential swamps in the world is now something like a health resort. Not only is the mosquito a rarity but also the domestic fly. After a myriad flies and two Tanglefoots a day, it was strange to arrive in an even hotter latitude and find no flies. I was told, "If you find a mosquito in your room at the hotel, telephone the office."
Not only are there no flies, but no smells, no decaying fruit. You may be arrested if you drop a banana skin in the street. The Chinamen and the "Spigs" and the Jamaicans who live in rows of double-story frame buildings, the sort of ramshackle places always associated with filthy living, have been terrorized into cleanly living. Hygiene has been forced on them at the point of the bayonet. Even the red-light streets are clean, and all those places of low pleasure designed to empty the pockets of seamen are at least sterilized. The women are also under control. The consequence is that the Panama Canal Zone is now a remarkably safe and healthy place. In fact, a memorandum was sent recently from Washington, part of an economy campaign, asking that the expenses on sanitary work in the zone be cut down somewhat until the death-rate reached that of the general average of the States.
American sanitary science has shown the world that any pest-hole can be cleaned up. The sad fact is that few nations have the energy to prosecute such a work of sanitation—Greeks at Salonika, Russians on the Black Sea littoral, Negroes on the Gold Coast, Cubans at Habana. America has a passion for "cleaning up." She is the self-constituted universal cleanser, Babbitt in excelsis.
It cannot be denied, however, that the United States is the home of graft. America has a long-time reputation for graft. Votes are bought in blocks. Police, jurymen, judges know the meaning "In God we trust; others pay cash." But, paradoxically enough, the standard of American character is high. Compared with the personal character of Mexicans, Panamanians, Cubans, it is lifted into an exalted sphere. The Latin-Americans stand around waiting for cash—that is their curse, and they are ready to sell rights, liberties, lands, children—everything for cash down.
Truth to say, if America were so eaten up with graft as her reputation says, the Panama Canal would never have been constructed. It was too big a job to be carried through by people of debauched wills. It is a monument of America's executive power, of her technical knowledge, and of her readiness to use that knowledge and stake millions upon it.
Every foreign ship passing through the Canal bows to the Stars and Stripes, and, though paying a money due, yet acknowledges a debt of civilization to the American people. Engineers, captains, tourists, crews, all obtain a new impression of America.
America ceases to be a land merely of canned goods, Yankee dialect, and oil kings. Its flag comes nearer to the Union Jack as one of world-civilizing power. The ships pass deliberately through with processional slowness. Ever more ships, ever more diverse in nationality. There is a great dignity about the traffic of the Canal, like the stately manners of a bygone age. The ships represent their nations, and come as guests through American waters. America is the hostess of the world.
After all, that which is most respected in the world is visible achievement. And whilst bad manners generally accompany sham strength or actual weakness, good manners are enjoined by the sense of power. A prophecy of more than two hundred years' standing made by the founder of the Bank of England, hails the possessor of "these doors of the seas" as the coming law givers of both oceans and the arbitrators of the commercial world. The Panama Canal delivers Central and South America to Wall Street, to the American commercial commonwealth, to the American people.
Every month just now sees the traffic record broken. More and more ships pass through. More and more business is being done. What will be the normal average traffic—no one yet can tell. The Canal was opened in the gloom of the war. There were slides of silt which closed it again, and a war menace which overcast its importance at the time. Its real significance has been overclouded, and all praise has been underpraise. It must necessarily now shine forth more and more as one of the maritime gates of the world, looked to from England, China, Australia, from the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and from all the islands of the South Seas. It automatically doubles the trade of the Southern and Central American republics of the Pacific coast with the United States. The latter can make up all European losses and most deficiencies in raw materials by way of the Canal. Whilst the American flag certainly waves less on European waters, it waves more on the Pacific Ocean. Pan-Americanism, the dream of Stephen Douglas and many others, is carried nearer to realization—the dream that America should rule all the way from the Canadian Line to the Isthmus, without question and without regret.
That the United States will ever rule South of the Equator seems questionable. Such a rule belongs possibly to the next century but one. But, for the time being, she has an economic hold even upon South America. As regards Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the rest, she begins to have a very strong control. Despite the noise of protest, there is not much real patriotic stamina in the people of these countries. They have less sense of nationhood than Austrians or Eskimos. Almost everything can be bought from them for cash down. So they necessarily go under the influence of American capital.
The Old World is greatly jealous of America's imperial march forward, and will naturally follow the progress with much malignity. And the Radicals and Liberal idealists within America have already raised a cry which must yet sound much louder. Empire was never foreseen by the fathers of the Republic. It is opposed to the historical conception of American liberty. It makes the Declaration of Independence more out of place than ever. But what is to be done? America, by her big business and the system, is betrayed to an imperial destiny, and cannot help herself. Her vast surplus of capital, her gold accumulations, must in the human way of necessity find an outlet for use. The West has been exploited. The Old World is distrusted. There remains inevitably and obviously the South.
"Go South, young man!" is being substituted in the consciousness of the American for the old cry of "Go West!"
The inwardness of the idea that Jamaica, Barbadoes, Bermuda, and the rest of the British island-possessions of the Indies should be assigned to the United States in part payment of the war-debt, much talked of before the Baldwin settlement of the debt question, is part of the new American march to the South. The control of Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo is part of it. The sapping of Mexico and Nicaragua is part of it. Without the Canal as an inalienable possession these things might be overlooked, might indeed be gone back upon by America itself. But a mere visit to the Canal is said to have power to change an American Radical into a patriotic Expansionist. In fact, with regard to the direction of policy and the achievement of national destiny, the Radicals in America seem more negligible than the German Socialists proved to be in 1914. They do not deserve the persecution they have had. They live by the system and are carried along by the system, and the system leads to imperial power.
It is urged, however, that Empire means War. It means bloodshed and sorrow and despair for thousands in every decade of its history. That is generally true. And yet America is remarkably free from enemies. The Latin-Americans have a practice of hating Americans, calling them "Gringoes," "Mejos," and the rest, but it is a weak hate easily transmutable to respect and warm regard. There is nothing to fear from it. Great Britain is of course a mercantile rival on the high seas, but America and England are too much intermarried and too much intertwined in business interests to fight a war. Moreover, we speak the same language. Mutual abuse is merely partisanship, the slang of the fanatics; and we are no more likely to fire on one another than the Giants of New York and the Red Sox of Chicago. As regards the Canal—that is a sort of strategic position Britain has historically seized when she had a chance. But one thing is sure; Britain rejoices in the fact that that water-way is in the hands of people who speak English and have the standard Anglo-Saxon point of view. In the case of a war, even with Japan, Great Britain would probably lend her aid to the United States to keep the Canal open and to safeguard it from destruction.
Japan remains as the only serious potential enemy on America's horizon. And despite ill feeling and hot words one cannot but remember that that horizon is several thousand miles away. There is a great stretch of cooling water between the nominees for the next great fight. The only real danger lies in the brains of some heady politician who at some future date may decide on an aggressive war against Japan in her own waters. Such a war might conceivably be fraught with disaster and humiliation for the United States—for the vast Pacific will always aid the side which is in defense.
In short, as far as America is concerned, Nature is on the side of Peace. I foresee five hundred years of prosperity and peace, after which, no doubt, America will weaken. The growth of the American Empire is the greatest fact in the world to-day—more significant than the decay of Europe. Russia, one must remember, is smashed, with her whole nation down on a gypsy level of culture. Germany prostrate under the heel of France nears the condition of Russia. France is self-centered and contented with a Mediterranean empire. Britain marks time. Alone America goes on. She stands now with her hundred million educated population, with her vast wealth and serried ranks of millionaires, with her unsurpassed technical equipment and industrial organization, and she has an enormous appetite for power and zest for life. The imagination ought to be given free play in thinking of the coming time.
Bearing in mind that America has finally and absolutely rejected Bolshevism, Communism, and all other disjectory theories of government, has, in fact, affirmed in absolute fashion the rights of property and her loyalty to the capitalistic system, one can almost forecast by mathematics the state of her wealth at any given date. What a stupendous aggregation of material splendor! If in the last sixty years America has risen from the Civil War level to what she is to-day, to what will she rise in sixty years from now? To what will she rise in six hundred years? The mind refuses to give the answer to the sum, but instead whispers the lines—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet
Lest we forget!
It is so easy to forget.
How the soul of America will fare in all this I have not sought to know. The soul abhorreth a golden treasure house, preferring greatly a humble and a loving heart. America is one thing not answerable to God. Americans will find themselves in America, as Romans found themselves in Rome. Individually, now as ever, and like the rest of us, they will have to find their personal way of Salvation.
One thing which the great World War seems to have revealed is that we are physically subject to forces over which we have little or no control. These forces are generally called economic, and are thought to be academic and theoretic. That is a mistake. They are elemental and primitive; Lloyd Georges and Wilsons do not divert them. On the contrary, they themselves sweep statesmen away when the time comes—and sweep other statesmen into power.
Such a force drives the American flag southward, and the cry is heard "Go South!"