I will conclude this chapter with an interesting little fact which may already have occurred to the reader. From the moment the Panama Canal is opened it will be possible for the first time to sail all round the world from England wholly in the northern hemisphere and without crossing the Equator. Who will be the first circumnavigator along the all-northern trail?
FOOTNOTE:
[19] Many persons may have expected these countries to be much nearer New York. They do not realize that nearly all South America lies east of North America. Washington is on the same meridian as Callao on the coast of Peru. Antofagasta and Iquique, the chief nitrate ports of Chile, have the longitude of Boston. The eastern point of Brazil lies 2,600 miles east of New York, and is equidistant from New York Bay and the English Channel.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE CANAL AND THE AMERICAS.
The likely effects of the Panama Canal on international commerce and the development of the world's resources is so big a subject that one can do little more than indicate the larger probabilities. The influence of the canal on the British Empire must be left to another chapter. Here we shall have to consider mainly the case of the United States, the country which stands to gain far more than any other from this new link between East and West.
The most obvious result of the new event, as it was the main object of the canal's construction, must be the immensely quickened all-sea communication between the eastern and western coasts of North America. The motive for the building of the canal was military rather than commercial. It was rendered necessary by painful experience during the Spanish-American War of the effects of the 14,000-mile sea journey between the two seaboards of the republic. But the commercial results will not be the less important because they were not foremost in the object and motive of the canal-builders. It is pretty clear that what we may call the main developmental effect of the canal will be felt along that Pacific coast of the Americas which has been so long shut out from the great centres of industrial enterprise in the New World and the Old.
We are so accustomed to regard the United States as a fully developed and fully equipped country that we forget how slowly her population and industries advanced westward from the Atlantic coasts. Even now it cannot be said that the railroad communications between the east and the Pacific states beyond the great mountain-divide of the Rockies are fully equal to the carriage of the produce which is or should be exchanged between east and west. The transcontinental lines have scarcely yet furnished a cheap and satisfactory connection between the Pacific coast states and their largest and most natural markets. Hitherto the railways have had to compete with only three alternative routes: (1) the all-sea route round Cape Horn for sailers, and through Magellan Straits for steamers; (2) the route via Panama, with railroad transit over the isthmus; (3) the route via Tehuantepec, with railroad transit over that isthmus from Puerto Mexico on the Gulf to Salina Cruz on the Pacific. The new canal will be a much more formidable competitor. It is highly important that the industries of the United States should have the benefit of this healthy tug-of-war between railroad and canal, and the government is perfectly justified in keeping that competition open, even to the length of forbidding the use of the canal to ships owned, controlled, or operated by railway companies.