The Spooner act and the Hay-Varilla treaty contemplated the fortification and military protection of the canal route. No proposition affecting this policy is now before the Senate. In so far as the type of canal to be adopted has a bearing upon the jeopardy to or immunity of the canal from risk of malicious injury, the subject of safety and protection is pertinent and most important. If a canal of one type would be more liable to injury than another, this liability should under no circumstances be neglected in determining the type or plan. It does not require argument that the use of the canal by the United States will cease if the control passes to a hostile power between which and the United States a state of war exists, but this is true whatever the type may be.
As the majority of the committee point out, "no proposition affecting this project is now before the Senate." In my opinion, none is necessary. The neutrality of the canal is, by implication at least, assured, and we have pledged our national good faith that the waterway will be open to all the nations of the world. Some time in the future, when the canal is completed and an accepted fact, it may be advisable to adopt the course pursued in the case of the Suez Canal. The original concession for that canal provided, by section 3, for its subsequent fortification, but this was never carried into effect. By a convention dated December 22, 1888, among Great Britain, Germany, and other nations, the free navigation of the Suez Canal was made a matter of international agreement, and the same has been reprinted as Senate Document No. 151, Fifty-sixth Congress, first session, under date of February 6, 1900.
This, in any event, is a problem of the future. The canal is the property of the United States, and we shall always retain control. In the event of war we shall rely with confidence upon our navy to protect our interests on the Pacific and in the Caribbean Sea, but even more may we rely upon the all-important fact that it could never be to the interest of any other nation sufficient in size to be at war with us to destroy this international waterway, which will become an important necessity to the commerce of each and all. No neutral nation engaged in extensive commerce or trade would for an instant allow another nation at war with the United States to injure or destroy the canal or to seriously interfere with the traffic passing through it. To destroy as much as a single lock, to injure as much as a single gate, would be considered equal to an act of war by every commercial nation of the earth. In this simple fact lies a greater assurance of safety than in all the treaties which might be made or in all the fortifications which might be established to protect the canal.
The majority of the committee well say in their report, that the power of mischief "is within easy reach of all." The possibility of an assumed occurrence is very remote from its reasonable probability. We have to rely upon our own good faith and the watchful eyes of our officers. Against possible contingencies, such as are implied in the assumed destruction of the locks by dynamite or other high explosives, we can do no more than take the same precautions which we take in all other matters of national importance. We have to take our chances the same as any other nation would; the same as commercial enterprise would. Certainly the remote possibility of such an event, the still more remote contingency that the injury would be serious or fatal to the operation of the canal, should not govern in a decision to construct a canal for the use of the present generation rather than for the generations to come. No canal can be built free from vulnerable points; no forts, no battleships, can be built free from such a risk. It would be folly to delay the construction of a canal; it would be folly to sink a hundred million dollars or more upon so remote a contingency as this, which belongs to the realm of fanciful or morbid imagination rather than to the domain of substantial fact and actual experience.
As a last resort, the opposition to a lock canal brings forward the earthquake argument. It is a curious reminder of the early and bitter opposition to the building of the Suez Canal; its enemies had to fall back upon the absurd theory that the canal would prove a failure because the blowing sands of the desert would soon fill the channel. It was seriously proposed to erect a stone wall four feet high on each side of the embankment to provide against this imaginary danger to the canal. Another early objection to the Suez Canal was that the Red Sea level was 30 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, only set at rest in 1847 by a special commission, which included Mr. Robert Stephenson, the great son of a great father, bitter to the last in his opposition to the canal, which he considered an impracticable engineering scheme. There was much talk about the assumed prevalence of strong westerly winds on the southern Mediterranean coast, and the danger of constantly increasing deposits of the Nile, it was said, would render the establishment of a port impossible. It was necessary to place a war-ship for a whole winter at anchor three miles from the shore to prove the error of this assumption and set at rest a foolish rumor which came near proving fatal to the enterprise.
Earthquakes have occurred on the Isthmus, and there is record of one shock of some consequence in 1882. The matter has been inquired into in a general way by the various Isthmian commissions, and assumed some prominence during the discussions and debates regarding a choice of routes. It was plain to even the least informed that the volcanic belt of Nicaragua constituted a real menace to a canal in that region; and one of the strongest arguments advanced in the minority report of the Senate committee of 1902, submitted by Senator Kittredge, now a leading advocate of the sea-level project, in opposition to the Nicaragua Canal, was the assertion of the practical freedom of the Panama Isthmus from the danger of earth movements.
The minority of the Senate committee of 1902 in their report, summing up the final reasons in favor of the Panama route (section 12), said:
At Panama earthquakes are few and unimportant, while the Nicaraguan route passes over a well-known coastal weakness. Only five disturbances of any sort were recorded at Panama, all very slight, while similar official records at San Jose de Costa Rica, near the route of the Nicaragua Canal, show for the same period fifty shocks, a number of which were severe. (P. 11, S. Rep. 783, part 2, 57th Cong., 1st session, May 31, 1902.)
In another part of their report the committee said:
With the dreadful lessons of Martinique and St. Vincent fresh in our minds, we should be utterly inexcusable if we deliberately selected a route for an Isthmian canal in a region so volcanic and dangerous, when a route is open to us which is exposed to none of these dangers and is in every other respect more advantageous.