The Panama Canal

by Frederic J. Haskin

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.