New markets will be found on the Atlantic for British Columbia lumber and paper. This new large demand will increase the price. But the saving of freight is an enormous item. The present freight-rates from Vancouver to Liverpool are sixteen dollars per 1,000 feet. The canal will give British Columbia a rate of about eight dollars per 1,000 feet. This difference per 1,000 will add to the value of British Columbia timber destined for Europe. But it is for more reasons than this that British Columbia is destined to be a vast Imperial industrial workshop. While her agricultural and horticultural possibilities are far beyond what is generally supposed, British Columbia is in natural resources and raw materials of industry one of the richest areas on the globe. But above all is she rich in mechanical power—water-power and coal. These are about to be opened up and developed. Their development soon will be beyond computation, for, roughly speaking, there is not an investment in British Columbia to-day which will not be directly increased in value by the new canal; but also much indirectly in the impetus given to development. This one thing—this canal—costing us nothing—will double, quadruple, and quintuple values out there in a few brief years. With easier access will come new trade, and new demands will create new products, and soon the innumerable water-powers of British Columbia will start the wheels of a thousand new industries. The illimitable resources of the province will be opened up, developed, and utilized at home or shipped abroad. The value of every town lot and of every acre of land of the 395,000 square miles of the province will be greatly enhanced; town sites will be hewed out of the forests, and the forests themselves—every stick of wood of their 182,000,000 acres of forest and woodland—will be increased in value directly, by reason of cheaper shipping alone, to the extent of several dollars per 1,000 feet; and in the items of lumber and wood-pulp alone the Panama Canal will make as a free gift to British Columbia considerably more than the United States is spending on the whole canal.
The mines of British Columbia, which have already produced over £70,000,000, will leap forward with renewed prosperity. Her fisheries, which have produced £21,000,000, will be more extensively developed and, let us hope, be made again a British asset—since they are wholly in the hands of the Japanese, who not only send their earnings home to Japan, but are criminally wasteful in their methods. The coal deposits of the province, which promise to be the most extensive in the world, will, with immense deposits of iron, be opened to the world's markets. It is said that the coal-fields of one small district in the Kootenay are capable of yielding 10,000,000 tons of coal a year for over seven thousand years, and a new district has been discovered within a twelvemonth which the provincial mineralogist told me on Christmas Eve was the most important economic discovery ever made in British Columbia, where there are known to be 1,000 square miles of the best of anthracite, and which is probably the richest known anthracite district in the New World west of Pennsylvania.[21]
The references to coal are especially interesting in this passage. It is an evidence of the public alertness in this matter that the British Columbian government has just appointed a special commissioner "to investigate and report upon all circumstances and conditions incident to the production and sale or other disposition of coal in British Columbia."
It may be certain, therefore, that the opening of the canal will be followed by a rapid growth of exports from Canadian ports, serving a thousand miles of hinterland, many of the vessels returning laden with the manufactures of the eastern United States and Europe, both streams of traffic flowing through the isthmian canal. But we must not overlook the growth in passenger traffic. The sea-passage round by the canal from Europe to the Pacific states of North America will be much cheaper and to many people more pleasant than the fatiguing transcontinental railway journey. Fresh brain and muscle will enter Canada by its western portals, new needs will arise, new industries spring up, a new æon of progress and enterprise begin on the far Pacific slopes when the first vessel mounts and descends the mighty steps of this wonder-working isthmian highway.
THE WEST INDIES.
But there is another region of the British Empire which will benefit only less, if less at all, than the Pacific province of Canada. The West Indies will feel at once the throb of a new life and interest when the canal is thrown open to the world's traffic. These "pearls of ocean," the oldest of England's oversea possessions, have lain hitherto in what the Americans call a "dead end." They are thrown across the entrances to a land-girt sea, the Mediterranean of the New World, from which there has hitherto been no exit to the west or the south, but only a return by the same passages to east and north. A glance at a map will show how these islands, the Greater and Lesser Antilles,[22] cluster round the Atlantic end of the canal and beset all the possible sea-routes from east and north and south-east. Every vessel that makes from the Atlantic for the canal entrance or quits the canal for the Atlantic will have to pass through this star-thick storied archipelago.
The islands naturally fall into two groups, with the names I have just mentioned. The Greater Antilles, lying further to the west and north-west, consist of Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, these last being administered by Jamaica. To this group belongs, geographically and historically, the mainland colony of British Honduras, a territory rather larger than Wales, whose great value England has scarcely begun to appreciate. The Lesser Antilles, stretched like a jewelled coronet round the eastern entrance to the Caribbean, consist, north to south, of the Virgin Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica (these forming the Leeward Islands Confederation), St. Lucia, Barbados, St. Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, and Tobago (the Windward Islands). With this group goes naturally British Guiana, on the continent east of the Spanish Main, a territory much larger than Great Britain, which should also begin to develop its vast resources more adequately when the canal is opened.
These islands, being largely inhabited by black people, cannot be entrusted with complete self-government like purely white communities. They are under various forms of what is known as crown colony government. For example, Trinidad and the Windward Islands are under the complete control of the British Colonial Office, while Barbados and Jamaica enjoy a large measure of self-rule. But this division into a large number of small governments without any connection with each other is extremely expensive, and proposals have been made for a federation of the British West Indies either in one great system, including them all, with British Honduras and Guiana thrown in, or in two systems embracing respectively the Greater and the Lesser Antilles.
England, it must be confessed, has treated her splendid West Indian empire very badly. In order that she might have sugar "dirt-cheap" at home she allowed the great staple product of the isles and mainland, cane-sugar, to be brought to the verge of ruin by the competition of European bounty-fed beet-sugar. Happily there was a statesman of strong imperial sympathies in England, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who arranged the Brussels Sugar Convention with certain Powers of Europe, all of which agreed to suppress their own bounties and to impose countervailing duties on bounty-fed sugar imported from countries outside the convention. This gave the West Indies a fairer chance of competition, and they quickly felt the benefit. But the convention was always opposed in England by certain industries in which sugar is used and is therefore wanted as cheap as possible, and notice has recently been given, despite the protests and alarms of the West Indies, that England intends to withdraw from the convention. And this, too, without any sort of compensation for the sugar-islands, which had begun to rely upon the protection against unfair competition afforded by that instrument.
England has withdrawn her garrisons and, what is still more serious, almost her entire navy from the West Indies. When the terrible earthquake occurred at Kingston in Jamaica in 1907, there was no English ship-of-war anywhere near to render help and to maintain order, and this duty had to be performed by vessels of the American fleet. Five days after that disaster the correspondent of The Times wrote: "It is difficult to describe the sense of humiliation with which an Englishman surveys Kingston harbour this evening—two American battleships, three German steamers, a Cuban steamer, and one British ship; she leaves to-night, and the white ensign and the red ensign will be as absent from Kingston harbour as from the military basins of Kiel and Cherbourg." And this is what England calls ruling the waves and being mistress of the seas! Later in the same year she had another lesson. Rioting broke out in St. Lucia, once, but no longer, an important naval base. It was a whole week before an English cruiser arrived, though a Dutch man-of-war, the Gelderland, was anchored in the spacious harbour of Castries, St. Lucia's capital.