Nor will the Suez Canal be an abandoned waterway after our own cut at Panama is completed. It will, indeed, be not surprising to see the Suez Canal tonnage increase, for trade breeds trade, and the Panama Canal will be a stimulant as well as a competitor. To all of British India and Southern China the distance from Liverpool via Suez is less than via Panama, and to Melbourne, Sidney and other Australian ports the saving in distance via Panama is less than 2000 miles. The Suez Canal, it is to be remembered, is owned by Great Britain and a very slight concession in rates will be all that is needed to keep British merchant vessels to their long accustomed routes. We have had a harder task in digging our Canal than the French had at Suez, but we need cherish no delusive idea that we are going to put the earlier waterway out of business.
PART OF THE COMPLETED CANAL
The really great material advantage which the United States is to derive from this monumental national undertaking will come from the all-water connection between our own Atlantic and Pacific coasts. A ship going from New York to San Francisco via the Straits of Magellan traverses 14,000 miles of sea—some of it the very most turbulent of all King Neptune’s tossing domain. By Panama the same ship will have but 5000 miles to cover. The amazing thing is that ships are going around the Horn, or at least through the Straits, but the high rates on transcontinental railroads make even that protracted voyage profitable. What the Canal will do to transcontinental rates is a matter that is giving some railroad managers deep concern. It was in fact a consideration which led to prolonged and obstinate opposition to the building of any canal at all. Water carriage between the two coasts has long been a bogey to the railroad managers. When coastwise steamships on the Atlantic and Pacific with the Panama Railroad for a connecting link offered some competition, the five transcontinental railways pooled together and, securing control of the Pacific Mail Steamship line operating between San Francisco and Panama, used it to cripple all competition. For a time there was danger that the methods then employed might be adopted to destroy the usefulness of the Panama Canal, and it was to guard against this that Congress adopted the law denying the use of the Canal to vessels owned by railroad companies.
HIS MORNING TUB
At the time of its passage this law created much discussion. The reason for it was widely misunderstood. Its first effect was the canceling of several orders for ships placed by railroad companies with shipbuilders in anticipation of the Canal’s opening, and the public naturally cried out against a measure which seemed to interpose an obstacle to the reappearance of the American flag on the high seas. But the law was bred of bitter experience. In bygone days it was discovered that both time and money could be saved on shipments from California to New York or other Atlantic seaports by sending them to Panama by water, across the Isthmus by rail, and then by water from Colon to their destination. This route grew in favor until the transcontinental railroads intervened to check its further development. Getting control of the Pacific Mail line of steamers from San Francisco to Panama, they first put their rates so low as to drive all competing ships from the route. Of course they lost money, but the loss was apportioned among the companies forming the pool, and when the competing concerns had been ruined or driven out of business, the rates were put up again and the losses that had been incurred were speedily recouped. Once the complete monopoly on the Pacific had been secured, every effort was made to discourage shipments by that route. The ships passed Los Angeles, the greatest fruit port in the country, without a call, but touched at innumerable little mud villages in Central America so as to make the time of through shipments intolerable. They often sailed with half a cargo—refusing to take freight that lay at their docks on the plea that all their cargo space was disposed of. It was—to the railroads who afterward gathered up the rejected freight and shipped it east over their own lines at prices to suit themselves.
NATIVE GIRL, CHORRERA PROVINCE