Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

THE NATIVE MILLS GRIND SLOWLY

In endeavoring to make things pleasant and easy for the gold employee the Isthmian Commission has made so many provisions for his comfort that many timid souls at home raised the cry of “socialism” and professed to discern in the system perfected by Col. Goethals the entering wedge that would split in pieces the ancient system of free competition and the contract system for public work. While I was on the Zone a very distinguished financier of New York, a banker of the modern type with fingers in a host of industrial enterprises, delivered himself of this interesting forecast of the results of the education in collectivism which the United States government is giving to some thousands of men upon the Isthmus:

“The big thing is the spirit of paternalism, of modern socialism, of governmental parenthood, if you will, which is being engendered and nursed to full strength by Federal control of the Canal. This is no idle dream, and within five years, yes, within three years, it will begin to be felt in the United States.

COMMISSION ROAD NEAR EMPIRE

“Quietly large corporations are studying this feature of the unloading of the skilled, highly intelligent Canal workers on the industries of the United States. There are thousands of trained employees of the Panama Canal Commission—which is to say of the United States government. When these well paid, lightly worked, well and cheaply fed men return to their native land they will form a powerful addition to the Socialist party.

“These workmen will take up tasks for private corporations. They will find lower salaries, longer hours and a greatly increased cost of living. The conveniences and amusements which they have found either free or very cheap in the Canal Zone will be beyond the reach of many of them, and they are going to chafe under the changed conditions.

“They will compare private or corporate ownership with government control as manifested in the Canal works, and the comparison will inevitably result to the detriment of the methods followed in the United States. This will be in no sense an array of capital against labor. It will be a psychological and political movement for the betterment of the conditions of the trained worker irrespective of party or class or union affiliations. That is one reason that it will be so powerful.

“These men will be engaged in industries subject to strikes and other industrial and sociological disturbances. They will give their fellow workmen, who have always been employed in the United States, a new and logical idea of the value of government ownership and its advantages to the workingman as shown on the Canal Zone.