CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CANAL AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE.
One of the most important results of the Panama Canal, one which is likely to have the largest influence on future political history, seems scarcely to have been noticed by writers on this subject. I have shown how much nearer Australia and New Zealand are brought to New York than to Liverpool, owing to the isthmian passage. They are brought of course proportionately nearer to the eastern provinces, which are also the governmental headquarters of Canada. But the moving away, so to speak, of these great countries from England, and their closer approximation to the great and growing branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock in America, has the effect of locating the centre of gravity of the English-speaking races more firmly and permanently than ever in the New World. When Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have grown for another quarter of a century, and the United States have reaped for so long the advantage in wealth and power of the new waterway, the little islands of the United Kingdom may begin to appear as a detached and distant fragment, rather than as the "heart and hearth," of the British Empire and the English-speaking world. In the eighteenth century, when the English plantations in America began to develop their manufactures and had increased rapidly in population, the question was discussed in England how long she could continue to control an oversea empire, likely to be in time more populous and prosperous than the home-country itself, from these far-away islands of the Old World. It was actually suggested at that time that the King of England should carry his crown and throne where the most part of his subjects were congregated. That suggestion is not likely to be repeated. We have found a way of harmonizing local self-government with imperial unity. But the position of England in her empire is sure to be greatly modified as time goes on, and the Panama Canal, by bringing these vast and undeveloped continents and isles of the far south-west so much nearer to North America than to the imperial centre, cannot fail to have some influence in this direction. From a commercial point of view, its effect will be to increase the value and importance of those trade preferences which Australia gives the home country in her markets.
Probably no single country in the world, certainly no portion of the British Empire, stands to gain so tremendously from the opening of the canal as British Columbia. England has not yet realized what enormous resources are locked up in this province of the furthest west, which looks out from a hundred harbours to the Pacific and across to the awakening East. The long haul across the continent, the interminable sea-trail round the Horn, twice crossing the equator, kept British Columbia, until lately, outside the thought and interest, not only of Englishmen, but even of the Canadians of the administrative East. Even with the gradual filling of the empty middle and west, geography would have continued to be against British Columbia. But the Panama Canal makes all the difference. This province will no longer look vaguely and dreamily to the western sea-spaces and a still half-slumbering Orient. She will suddenly find herself at one end of a sea-route which will shorten her distance from New York by 8,415 miles and from Liverpool by 6,046 miles.
Her timber and other produce will no longer toil wearily in the holds of the "windjammer" down the whole length of Northern, Central, and Southern America. There at Balboa, less than halfway down, is the entrance of the long-desired short-cut to the world-centres of progress and enterprise. The electric thrill of this new circuit will be felt not only along the havens and fjords of the British Columbian coast, but nearly a thousand miles inland. We may say that almost the whole western half of Canada, where the golden wheat frontiers are ever advancing, will face about and henceforth look west instead of east. All the corn and produce of Alberta and Western Saskatchewan will flow, not eastwards as heretofore, but to the Pacific shores, there to be shipped for transit via the canal to the southern and eastern United States, to the north and east of South America, and to the Old World over the Atlantic. Even the eastern and western fronts of the Dominion will feel the grip of a new link, which may serve important naval and defensive interests for Canada.
The new Pacific outlet will have many advantages over the eastern. For one thing, it is always ice-free, whereas the eastern route is icebound for five months in the year. Even now, I understand, it is appreciably cheaper in winter to send wheat from Calgary to Liverpool by Vancouver than by St. John's, New Brunswick. The freight-rate between British Columbian and United Kingdom ports should be at least halved when the canal is in operation. Of all cities in any clime or hemisphere, Vancouver seems to stand most surely on the threshold of a new and mighty future. She will have "greatness thrust upon her." Her citizens are preparing for the spacious days that are about to set in. A "Great Vancouver" will probably arise from the nine local municipalities, to provide an area and administration worthy of the dawning era. Dr. F. B. Vrooman eloquently voiced the sentiment of the great port and of British Columbia at a recent luncheon of the Progress Club at Vancouver. He said:—
We are on the verge of nothing less than a revolution of the world's commerce, and industry, and finance, which now, as sure as fate, are destined to be transferred to the lands of the Pacific Ocean. It is not only revolution. It is such a revolution as never has been and never again can be foreordained before chaos primeval for this twentieth century of the Christian era, for there are no more hemispheres to cut in two. There are no more oceans, with half the water area on the world and twenty million square miles more than all the land surface of the globe, to be suddenly transferred into the arena of world trade. There are no more continents with the widest reaches, the richest resources, and the densest populations of the world to be awakened and developed after Asia has achieved its resurrection.
Therefore I say to you that there has got to be one port at least in the British Empire big enough to be equal to the greatest opportunity the world ever offered any city since time began. And if that city is not destined to be Vancouver, it will be for one, and for only one, reason—because the men of Vancouver have been too timid and feeble, too shortsighted and too little to take hold of what the good God has offered them.
I have already alluded to the question of coal in connection with the new canal. All the new routes will have to be cheaply and abundantly "coaled," or they will be at a great disadvantage in the competition for traffic with Suez. The Isthmian Canal Commission of 1899-1901 pointed out that the coaling stations at San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver will in the future bear about the same relation to the route via the Panama Canal to the Orient as the coaling stations at or near the Suez Canal bear to the route from Europe via Suez to the Orient. Among the Pacific Islands, at Colon and Panama, and among the West Indies coal will have to be stored in big quantities for the tramps and liners and warships which will soon be drawn along these seaways by the new canal. British Columbia has coal illimitable, and this interest alone ought to be quickly and mightily developed in the coming years. Happily there are men of imagination and public spirit in this great Pacific province of the empire who understand what the canal means to it in future wealth and welfare, and are preparing its people to take advantage of the new opportunities. Let an eloquent British Columbian, Dr. Vrooman again, open for us the broad and bright prospect:—