In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

Every foreign ship passing through the Canal bows to the Stars and Stripes, and, though paying a money due, yet acknowledges a debt of civilization to the American people. Engineers, captains, tourists, crews, all obtain a new impression of America.

America ceases to be a land merely of canned goods, Yankee dialect, and oil kings. Its flag comes nearer to the Union Jack as one of world-civilizing power. The ships pass deliberately through with processional slowness. Ever more ships, ever more diverse in nationality. There is a great dignity about the traffic of the Canal, like the stately manners of a bygone age. The ships represent their nations, and come as guests through American waters. America is the hostess of the world.

After all, that which is most respected in the world is visible achievement. And whilst bad manners generally accompany sham strength or actual weakness, good manners are enjoined by the sense of power. A prophecy of more than two hundred years' standing made by the founder of the Bank of England, hails the possessor of "these doors of the seas" as the coming law givers of both oceans and the arbitrators of the commercial world. The Panama Canal delivers Central and South America to Wall Street, to the American commercial commonwealth, to the American people.

Every month just now sees the traffic record broken. More and more ships pass through. More and more business is being done. What will be the normal average traffic—no one yet can tell. The Canal was opened in the gloom of the war. There were slides of silt which closed it again, and a war menace which overcast its importance at the time. Its real significance has been overclouded, and all praise has been underpraise. It must necessarily now shine forth more and more as one of the maritime gates of the world, looked to from England, China, Australia, from the Pacific coasts of North and South America, and from all the islands of the South Seas. It automatically doubles the trade of the Southern and Central American republics of the Pacific coast with the United States. The latter can make up all European losses and most deficiencies in raw materials by way of the Canal. Whilst the American flag certainly waves less on European waters, it waves more on the Pacific Ocean. Pan-Americanism, the dream of Stephen Douglas and many others, is carried nearer to realization—the dream that America should rule all the way from the Canadian Line to the Isthmus, without question and without regret.

That the United States will ever rule South of the Equator seems questionable. Such a rule belongs possibly to the next century but one. But, for the time being, she has an economic hold even upon South America. As regards Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the rest, she begins to have a very strong control. Despite the noise of protest, there is not much real patriotic stamina in the people of these countries. They have less sense of nationhood than Austrians or Eskimos. Almost everything can be bought from them for cash down. So they necessarily go under the influence of American capital.

The Old World is greatly jealous of America's imperial march forward, and will naturally follow the progress with much malignity. And the Radicals and Liberal idealists within America have already raised a cry which must yet sound much louder. Empire was never foreseen by the fathers of the Republic. It is opposed to the historical conception of American liberty. It makes the Declaration of Independence more out of place than ever. But what is to be done? America, by her big business and the system, is betrayed to an imperial destiny, and cannot help herself. Her vast surplus of capital, her gold accumulations, must in the human way of necessity find an outlet for use. The West has been exploited. The Old World is distrusted. There remains inevitably and obviously the South.

"Go South, young man!" is being substituted in the consciousness of the American for the old cry of "Go West!"

The inwardness of the idea that Jamaica, Barbadoes, Bermuda, and the rest of the British island-possessions of the Indies should be assigned to the United States in part payment of the war-debt, much talked of before the Baldwin settlement of the debt question, is part of the new American march to the South. The control of Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo is part of it. The sapping of Mexico and Nicaragua is part of it. Without the Canal as an inalienable possession these things might be overlooked, might indeed be gone back upon by America itself. But a mere visit to the Canal is said to have power to change an American Radical into a patriotic Expansionist. In fact, with regard to the direction of policy and the achievement of national destiny, the Radicals in America seem more negligible than the German Socialists proved to be in 1914. They do not deserve the persecution they have had. They live by the system and are carried along by the system, and the system leads to imperial power.

It is urged, however, that Empire means War. It means bloodshed and sorrow and despair for thousands in every decade of its history. That is generally true. And yet America is remarkably free from enemies. The Latin-Americans have a practice of hating Americans, calling them "Gringoes," "Mejos," and the rest, but it is a weak hate easily transmutable to respect and warm regard. There is nothing to fear from it. Great Britain is of course a mercantile rival on the high seas, but America and England are too much intermarried and too much intertwined in business interests to fight a war. Moreover, we speak the same language. Mutual abuse is merely partisanship, the slang of the fanatics; and we are no more likely to fire on one another than the Giants of New York and the Red Sox of Chicago. As regards the Canal—that is a sort of strategic position Britain has historically seized when she had a chance. But one thing is sure; Britain rejoices in the fact that that water-way is in the hands of people who speak English and have the standard Anglo-Saxon point of view. In the case of a war, even with Japan, Great Britain would probably lend her aid to the United States to keep the Canal open and to safeguard it from destruction.

Japan remains as the only serious potential enemy on America's horizon. And despite ill feeling and hot words one cannot but remember that that horizon is several thousand miles away. There is a great stretch of cooling water between the nominees for the next great fight. The only real danger lies in the brains of some heady politician who at some future date may decide on an aggressive war against Japan in her own waters. Such a war might conceivably be fraught with disaster and humiliation for the United States—for the vast Pacific will always aid the side which is in defense.