Prowling about Panama

by George A. Miller

WIRELESS AT DARIEN

The causes of economic backwardness and social conservatism are not difficult to locate and describe. From the cruel savagery of Pizarro and Balboa to the model communities of the Canal Zone is a far step. In the past seventy-five years the city of Panama has passed through a thousand years of social evolution, and in five years after Panama became an independent and sovereign nation the city was transformed, the government reorganized, and something like twentieth-century conditions replaced the filth and disease and squalor of the old days.

The prowler in social history will find plenty of material here. By all the precedents of progress Panama should have been prosperous centuries ago. While other cities of coming metropolitan centers were yet barren wastes and sleeping wildernesses Panama was on the highway of the world. When New York and San Francisco and Chicago were inhabited by birds and squirrels Panama was known everywhere. Panama had a century the start of all North America and was the pawn of kings and the gateway of empire before the Pilgrims landed in New England. If there be any advantage in an early start, Panama should have led us all in the race for a commanding position in the New World.

There is much in location. A single foot on Broadway is worth more than a farm in the desert. Great cities have great positions on the map, and Panama began with a situation to which the world simply had to come. A dozen different solutions of the transportation problem presented by the Isthmian power and navigation were proposed, but it always came back to Panama. Here is the narrowest part of the connecting link of the continents, and here is the lowest point in the continental backbone. Without lifting her hand or voice, Panama had but to dream and wait till the world should come and pour into her lap the commerce and progress of the modern age. To-day Panama is on the direct line of travel between almost any two great cities at opposite ends of the earth. Melbourne and London, New York and Buenos Ayres, Port au Spain and Honolulu—draw the lines, and they all pass through Panama.

It is an accepted axiom of unthinking people that gold and prosperity are synonymous. If this were true, Panama should be the most prosperous and progressive of all cities of the earth to-day. More gold has been carried through her streets, and stored in her warehouses, and handled by her people, than in any other city of the Americas. The Peru of the Conquest was lined and lacquered with gold. The palaces of the Incas and the Temples of the Sun were plastered and burnished with gold; and for a century this gold was loaded into European ships, taken to Panama and packed across the Isthmus and then reshipped to Europe to fill the coffers of profligate kings and bolster up the fortunes of fallen states. All of it came through Panama; and if much of it did not remain there, it was not due to conscientious scruples on the part of the Panamanians. If a stream of gold could bring progress, Panama should have led the world for three hundred years.

Probably the modern Republic of Panama is one of the very few endowed governments in the world. The purchase price of the Canal Zone, invested in New York real estate, yields an annual revenue which forms a part of the government budget. The annual payment of $250,000 by the Canal Zone also helps. Since the beginning of the French Canal enterprise a considerable part of the monthly payrolls of the Canal builders has found its way into the till of the merchants in Colon and Panama, and these terminal cities have largely lived on the Canal Zone trade. Certainly, Panama has even to-day some peculiar financial advantages—and if these could bring prosperity, Panama should be prosperous.

FARM GRIST MILL, COSTA RICA

When the California gold rush began in 1848 Panama awoke from her century and a half of slumber and trouble began afresh. Again there was gold on the Isthmus, and again there was crime. Hundreds of ships discharged their cargoes and passengers on one side of the Isthmus, and the trip across was one not to be forgotten.