My Wife
KITTIE ROSE PEPPER
AND TO
My Daughter
NORITA ROSE PEPPER
COMRADES IN MANY TRAVELS
PREFACE
MY purpose in this work is to consider and describe the effect of the Panama Canal on the West Coast countries of South America from the year 1905. At this period its construction by the United States may be said to have begun. If my own deep conviction that this influence makes powerfully for their industrial development and their political stability be an illusion, the pages which follow may afford the disbelievers grounds for pointing out wrong premises or false conclusions. “We doubt” long has been the dogma of the North American and the European in everything relating to the permanency of progress in the Spanish-American Republics. “I believe” is yet only the creed of the individual. A huge material fact obtruding itself may secure a listening ear from the doubters. The Canal obtrudes.
The severely practical Northern mind finds itself in a brain-fog with reference to the Southern Continent. Speculative reasoning regarding new forces of civilization does not appeal to it. It wants the concrete circumstances. Now the Canal is not an abstraction. The industrial and commercial energies which it wakens are not abstractions. The interoceanic waterway is a national undertaking, but it shows the way to individual enterprise. More than the gates of chance are opened to American youth. They are the gates of opportunity. Consequently the need of knowledge.
The number of recent books relating to the history of South America seems to indicate a demand for this knowledge in its primary form. They open the path for a volume which may be limited more strictly to industrial, fiscal, and political information. For that reason, while not overlooking the historical element in the institutions and governmental systems, I have not thought it necessary to consider them chronologically from the colonial epoch or even from the era of independence.