Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

PANAMA RAILROAD BRIDGE ACROSS THE CHAGRES

With all the South American countries the commerce of the Canal will tend to bring us into closer relations and to multiply the possibility of international dissension. Moreover, the growing interests of United States business men in those countries form national outposts on which we must ever keep a friendly eye. It is ridiculous to urge upon individuals the task of stimulating and extending our foreign trade if the government is to be wholly indifferent to their efforts. It is known that the great beef packers of Chicago have considerable plants in the Argentine; that a famous iron manufacturer of Pittsburgh has in Chile what is believed to be the largest iron mine in the world; that the Standard Oil Company has its agencies throughout the continent; and the Du Pont Powder Company besides maintaining two nitrate plants in Chile does a prodigious business in explosives with the various states—and not mainly for military purposes only. The United States Steel Company has a vanadium mine in Peru where 3000 Americans are working. The equipment of street railways and electric-lighting plants in South American cities is almost wholly of American manufacture. Even without the systematic encouragement of their home government, American business men have begun to make inroads upon German and English commercial power in South America, and the opening of the Canal will increase their activities. Today our Pacific coast is practically shut off from any interchange of commodities with Brazil and the Argentine; with the Canal open a direct waterway will undoubtedly stimulate a considerable trade. The more trade is stimulated, the more general travel becomes between nations, the less becomes the danger of war. There is no inconsistency in the statement that the Canal will become a powerful factor in the world’s peace, even though it does necessitate the maintenance of a bigger navy and the erection of powerful forts for its defense in the improbable event of war.

A STREET IN CHORRERA

This is but one phase of the influence the Canal will exercise upon countries other than the United States. What it will do for the Latin-American countries immediately adjacent to Panama in the direction of leading them to establish improved sanitation systems, or to perfect those they now maintain, is beyond present estimate. Many such governments have had their representatives on the Zone to study the methods there in force, and while the present writer was there Col. Gorgas was besought to visit Guayaquil to give its rulers expert advice on the correction of the unsanitary state of that city. Members of the staff of Col. Gorgas are in demand as experts in all parts of the world. I know of one who in the last days of the Canal construction was sent by the German government to establish in some of the German South African provinces the methods that brought health to the Isthmus after the days of the futile French struggle with fever and malaria.

It is because of this influence upon foreign peoples, already apparent, that far-sighted people find intolerable the proposition to let the Canal Zone grow up into jungle and return to its original state of savagery. It can and should be made an object lesson to the world. From every ship that makes the ten-hour passage of the Canal some passengers will go ashore for rest from the long voyage and to see what the Zone may have to show them. Are we content to have them see only the hovels of Colon and the languid streets of Panama—exhibits that give no idea of the force, the imagination, the idealism that gave being to the Canal? Today the Zone is a little bit of typical United States life set down in the tropics. So it might remain if due encouragement were given to industrious settlers. There is not so much land in the world that this need be wasted, nor have there been so many examples of the successful creation and continuance of such a community as the Zone has been as to justify its obliteration before the world has grasped its greatest significance.

A PEARL ISLAND VILLAGE

There are not lacking those philosophers who hold that the first political effect of the Canal will be to force us to abandon that attitude of national isolation and aloofness prescribed in Washington’s deprecation of “entangling alliances abroad”. They hold that this latest and greatest addition to our reasons for solicitude about the control of the Pacific will compel us to seek the coöperation of other powers—or another power—to make that control complete. Perhaps the proposition is most frankly stated in this paragraph from Mr. Frank Fox’s “Problems of the Pacific”.