The Panama Canal Part 11

Hispaniola was the mother colony of the Spanish Empire in the West Indies which has now wholly disappeared, very unfortunately for Spain in view of the enhanced value these islands will now soon acquire. In 1795 it was ceded to France, and soon afterwards the emanc.i.p.ated slaves gained possession of the island, and after a period of anarchy and bloodshed established their independence. It is divided into two negro and mulatto republics, Hayti and San Domingo, and, as might have been expected, has sunk to the lowest depths of possible human degradation.

Fetishism, human sacrifice, and even cannibalism prevail in this sea-girt Paradise, placed right among the possessions of the most civilized Powers of the world and now across the main ocean routes from the West to the United States, Canada, and the Old World. Can anybody believe that beautiful Hispaniola, an island 30,000 square miles in extent, whose economic and strategic value will be increased a hundredfold in the years that are coming, will long remain under this blighting shadow of ignorance and barbarism? Here certainly the Panama Ca.n.a.l will work a beneficent political change.

France, too, is beginning to look up her possessions and opportunities in the Caribbean. Here her two islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, are placed most conveniently for her ships coming westwards from Havre, Bordeaux, and St. Nazaire, while Tahiti and New Caledonia will pa.s.s them on over the Pacific to the Far East. M. Gilquin, writing in _La vie Maritime_, says:--

In Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and Tahiti our commerce--that is to say, exports and imports together--was, in the year 1909, ninety millions of francs; this rose to one hundred and twenty-two millions in 1910, and it is probable that when we get the figures for 1911 they will be found to be even more favourable. It is certain that with the opening of the Panama Ca.n.a.l a great increase in traffic will take place, and possessing, as we do, ports so advantageously placed on the princ.i.p.al lines of route, we should benefit extensively by that development of traffic between Europe and the western coasts of both North and South America. In order that we may reap the benefit, however, of the situation of our colonial harbours, it is necessary that these be taken in hand at once and rendered fit for the commerce they will be called upon to handle.

And what is England doing to prepare for the new epoch in these regions where she has planted her flag on so many rich and beautiful islands, strung like pearls of necklace and tiara over these warm tropical seas?

We hear of Jamaica providing a new site for coaling and ships' repairs near Kingston, of harbour improvements at Port of Spain (Trinidad) and St. George (Grenada), of oil-bunkering stations at Barbados and St.

Lucia. All this is good, but England will have to enter upon a very different policy for the future with regard to her West Indian empire.

She must show that she values her priceless inheritance in and round the Caribbean; that she is determined to maintain her position, to promote her commerce, and to further the interests of all her subjects in these regions.

What the West Indies need in order to be able to take the new opportunity by the forelock are organization and combination. Schemes have been proposed for federalizing the const.i.tution of the islands--placing them, that is, under a strong central government for those purposes that are common to them all. There are many difficulties in the way of such proposals. The nearest island of the Greater Antilles is 1,000 miles away from the nearest of the Lesser, so that Nature seems to have p.r.o.nounced for the present against any federal scheme embracing all the islands. But s.p.a.ce is always shrinking. Wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes may make 1,000 miles an inconsiderable distance for such political purposes. The Leeward Islands have already been organized under a single federal government, and it ought to be possible to extend the system. Moreover, the islands and the colonies on the continent are learning the value of common consultation and action in such matters as quarantine, and they meet together in annual agricultural conferences.

We need not wait for a formal and complete federal const.i.tution. Some central council for consultation on the best means of taking advantage of the new opportunities, some central fund for promoting common objects, such as advertising the wonderful attractions of the islands and preparing for the birds of pa.s.sage that will soon be coming from every civilized country in the Old and New World--all this is possible now. It is important, too, that the West Indian colonies should have some a.s.sembly or council through which they can address the Imperial Power with a single voice. England can give these colonies invaluable help. She can a.s.sist them to develop those steamship and telegraphic communications between the islands which are still so inadequate. She can indicate the best locations for harbours, coaling and repairing stations, and the other facilities which the new traffic will require.

In view of the certain growth in wealth and prosperity, the colonies ought to be able by contributions among themselves to provide a substantial fund for objects they can carry out in common for the advantage of each and all.

Some valuable information and very practical suggestion will be found in the report of the West Indian Commission presided over by Lord Balfour of Burleigh which was issued in 1910. Besides recommending a system of reciprocal trade preference between Canada and the West Indies, the commissioners made important proposals with regard to steamship and telegraphic communications. They favoured the public ownership and operation of the West Indian cables and possibly of the whole system northward to Halifax. They wrote:--

The single cables now connecting Halifax with Bermuda and Bermuda with Jamaica ought either to be duplicated or supplemented by wireless. A cable should be laid between Bermuda and Barbados, with a branch to Trinidad, and perhaps another to British Guiana. The cables which run from Jamaica to the eastern islands and British Guiana, sometimes single and sometimes duplicate, are very old. The bed of this part of the Caribbean being trying for cables, we believe it would be found advantageous in most cases not to renew them, but to replace them by wireless installations. If these were well arranged, they might form a satisfactory connection between the eastern islands and Jamaica and an alternative route to Bermuda, and render unnecessary duplication of the suggested Bermuda-Barbados cable. While it is desirable to connect British Honduras with Jamaica, we consider that the probable volume of traffic would not warrant the cost of a cable. We therefore recommend the employment of wireless for this purpose. Small installations should also be supplied to the outlying Leeward and Bahamas Islands.

England will have to foster the welfare of her possessions in these regions as she has never done before. The Brussels Convention forbade her to give any preference to sugar produced in her own dominions. But she is about to step out of that agreement, and will be at liberty, if she thinks fit, to encourage by preferential favours the one great staple for which these colonies can find no subst.i.tute. There may be differences of opinion on the fiscal question, but surely everybody must agree that the naval power and political prestige of the British Empire must be represented in the Caribbean Sea by something rather more impressive than two small and obsolete cruisers. If England is to maintain her position against the severer compet.i.tion she will now have to face, if she is to get her share of the new commerce now in prospect, she will have to give her traders, and shippers, and merchants all the confidence and encouragement which her flag should inspire. One or two well-equipped naval bases, a squadron of up-to-date cruisers for police and patrol work in the Caribbean and down the Pacific coasts of America, are indispensable. There must be no more earthquakes and destructions of British cities with never a British vessel to bring the sorely-needed help, no more riots in British islands with only a Dutch warship standing helplessly by.

Both British Columbia and the West Indies have complained with reason of the absenteeism of the British fleet from their sh.o.r.es. The necessity for concentrating all our naval power in the North Sea to meet the German menace has no doubt been the cause of these withdrawals from the outer sea-marches of the empire. But at any cost this wrong will have to be righted in the future. The West Indies and British Columbia are just the two portions of the empire which the Panama Ca.n.a.l may benefit most and most immediately, and they have a right to expect the support and co-operation of the imperial government wherever it can be given. All the Powers of the world will be afloat on the Caribbean and along the Pacific sea-trails to Balboa. Let the white ensign return to these seas and sh.o.r.es as an earnest to all that the same national spirit that won for England her political and commercial supremacy avails to maintain it now and in the new era which is just dawning.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] From the already-quoted paper read before the Royal Colonial Inst.i.tute, March 19, 1912.

[22] Marco Polo, following Aristotle's nomenclature, had given the name of "Antilla" to an island off the eastern coast of Asia. The name was transferred by Columbus, or Peter Martyr, to the islands of the Caribbean.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE NEW PACIFIC.

Some readers may perhaps think that these forecasts of the results of running a ca.n.a.l through the isthmus of Panama are somewhat exaggerated.

It is sufficient to point out to such a critic how different the course of American and world history might have been if Nature had left a practicable channel between the two Americas. The effect of erecting an artificial pa.s.sage there in these days may be even greater than at present we can imagine. Some of these results will be apparent at once; others may take decades or even centuries to materialize. Many of the commercial and political results which have followed the construction of the Suez Ca.n.a.l were quite unforeseen in 1869. We may be similarly mistaken in our forecast with regard to the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Mr. Bryce suggests that if a dozen experts were, in 1914, to write out and place in the libraries of the British Museum and of Congress their respective forecasts bearing on this subject, sealed up and not to be opened till A.D. 2000, they might make curious reading in that year. We may venture to predict that the results of Panama will be much more profound and revolutionary than those of Suez. The Panama Ca.n.a.l, says Mr. Bryce, is "the greatest liberty man has ever taken with Nature." It will involve a far greater shifting of centres of gravity, political and commercial, a more radical readjustment of ideas and points of view than the Suez Ca.n.a.l.

As the past four hundred years have belonged to the Atlantic, the present century and others to come may belong to the Pacific. That area of 70,000,000 square miles may become the main theatre of the rivalries--commercial, political, and racial--of the most powerful nations of East and West. Some believe that the world is advancing to that loud and fateful day when East and West will fight out their long difference in some naval and aerial Armageddon on and above this miscalled Pacific. Without straining our imaginations to this extent, we may well observe that the ca.n.a.l brings Eastern and Western civilizations into much closer contact and compet.i.tion than before. Mr.

Kipling has informed us that East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet; and a still earlier author, desiring to give the penitent sinner the uttermost consolation, declared that the Lord removes his transgressions from him "as far as the east is from the west."

The new ca.n.a.l rather diminishes the force of such similitudes. It is not simply that the east of Canada and the United States, as representing Western civilization, is brought much closer to China and j.a.pan; that the pa.s.sage from West to East which the early navigators vainly sought is now thrown open. The important thing is that the Pacific is going to be the scene of commercial and political rivalries in which the slowly awakening people of China and the already wide-awake people of j.a.pan will take part. All the Pacific Ocean westward to 160 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich is brought nearer to England and the western coasts of Europe. The entire ocean right back to the western extremity of Australia is brought closer to the governmental and industrial centres of the United States and Canada.

English people have been thinking "Atlantically" up to now. The Pacific, held at an unimaginable distance by a broad continent or an abyss of ocean, has been known to them chiefly through stories of adventure among its coral islands familiar to their childhood. Yet England is the greatest Pacific Power in the world. British Columbia alone has a Pacific sea-front longer than the United States, and holds 383,000 square miles, an area as large as France and Spain put together. And yet the population of that vast and fertile province is only 134,000. And what of the lonely continent that bounds this oceanic abyss in the far south-west? Australia, without New Zealand, is about 3,000,000 square miles in extent, and has to-day a white population of about 4,600,000, or about 4,700,000 people all told. The northern part of this mighty island-continent, known as the "Territory," 560 miles wide, 900 miles long, and 523,620 square miles in extent, a region of great potential wealth, has a total European population of 1,274! And to the north and north-west there are a billion (1,000,000,000) brown and yellow people, packed together in crowded islands and territories, whose mere overspill would quickly fill that delectable island-continent to the south where England has done so little to make good her nominal t.i.tle to sovereignty by actual and effective settlement.

Such a possession, an empire in itself, held so precariously and offering such a ceaseless temptation to swarming land-hungry hordes, is rather a weakness than a strength to England on the threshold of the new era. And from all this Pacific region and its adjuncts where she has secured all the empty and desirable plots and pegged out so many claims for posterity, she has had to withdraw her fleets, as Rome had to draw in her legions from the outer provinces to defend the central heart of her empire. We may hope that this North Sea danger, so embarra.s.sing and disastrous in its strategic needs to a power like England, whose empire is scattered over every ocean and continent, may disappear through the growth of better relations between the German and Anglo-Saxon branches of the Teutonic race. To that stock more than any other is committed the defence of Western and Christian ideas, and the great issues of the future may compel a Pan-Teutonic alliance, embracing the British and German Empires and the United States.

England has two responsibilities in the Pacific--the one to herself and her empire, and the other to Christendom and Western civilization. If she is true to the former, she cannot well be false to the latter. She must bring her fleets back to this great ocean and a.s.sert an influence in its politics proportionate to her territorial domains and the extent of her commerce in those regions. But there are objects more important than the interests of any single Power. The entire coast of the Pacific from Behring Straits to the Horn, and round south by New Zealand and Australia, must be kept "white"--reserved, that is, for the Occidental and Christian races. Perhaps the United States may one day so far modify the Monroe doctrine as to welcome Germany to a sovereign foothold among the unstable politics of South America, in order to strengthen still more the outposts of Christian civilization in the Western hemisphere.

It is possible to talk great nonsense about what is called the "yellow peril." No sensible person imagines that the nimble j.a.panese, the inscrutable Chinaman, and the subtle Hindoo are suddenly going to rise as one man and throw down the gage of challenge to Christianity and the West. East, like West, has its own political and religious divisions; nevertheless it is impossible to foresee what the results of the Oriental resurgence may mean, and England and the United States, and perhaps Germany, may some day have a joint responsibility in the Pacific compared with which their rivalries among themselves may seem trifling and irrational.

But I do not wish to end this little book with presages of future discord. We must all hope that the Panama Ca.n.a.l will prove a new and powerful influence for peace, that it will bring even East and West together, not in strife and suspicion, but in friendship and a better mutual understanding. There is surely a human interest and sympathy transcending even those racial divisions which may seem most insuperable. The great nation which has given this splendid gift to the world should ask no better or more selfish reward than that it may contribute to the welfare and progress of humanity at large.

APPENDIX I.

THE ISTHMIAN Ca.n.a.l CONVENTION (COMMONLY CALLED THE HAY-PAUNCEFOTE TREATY), 1901.

1. The high contracting parties agree that the present treaty shall supersede the aforementioned (Clayton-Bulwer) convention of April 19, 1850.

2. It is agreed that the ca.n.a.l may be constructed under the auspices of the government of the United States either directly at its own cost, or by gift or loan of money to individuals or corporations, or through subscription to or purchase of stock or shares, and that, subject to the provisions of the present treaty, the said government shall have and enjoy all the rights incident to such construction, as well as the exclusive right of providing for the regulation and management of the ca.n.a.l.

3. The United States adopts as the basis of the neutralization of such ship ca.n.a.l the following rules substantially as embodied in the Convention of Constantinople, signed the 28th October, 1888, for the free navigation of the Suez Ca.n.a.l; that is to say:

First.--The ca.n.a.l shall be free and open to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations observing these rules, on terms of entire equality, so that there shall be no discrimination against any such nation or its citizens or subjects in respect of the conditions or charges of traffic, or otherwise. Such conditions and charges of traffic shall be just and equitable.

Second.--The ca.n.a.l shall never be blockaded, nor shall any right of war be exercised nor any act of hostility be committed within it. The United States, however, shall be at liberty to maintain such military police along the ca.n.a.l as may be necessary to protect it against lawlessness and disorder.

Third.--Vessels of war of a belligerent shall not revictual nor take any stores in the ca.n.a.l except so far as may be strictly necessary; and the transit of such vessels through the ca.n.a.l shall be effected with the least possible delay in accordance with the regulations in force, and with only such intermission as may result from the necessities of the service. Prizes shall be in all respects subject to the same rules as vessels of war of the belligerents.

Fourth.--No belligerent shall embark or disembark troops, munitions of war or warlike materials in the ca.n.a.l except in case of accidental hindrance of the transit, and in such case the transit shall be resumed with all possible despatch.

Fifth.--The provisions of this article shall apply to waters adjacent to the ca.n.a.l, within three marine miles of either end. Vessels of war of a belligerent shall not remain in such waters longer than twenty-four hours at any one time except in case of distress, and in such case shall depart as soon as possible, but a vessel of war of one belligerent shall not depart within twenty-four hours from the departure of a vessel of war of the other belligerent.

Sixth.--The plant, establishment, buildings and all works necessary to the construction, maintenance and operation of the ca.n.a.l shall be deemed to be parts thereof for the purpose of this treaty, and in time of war, as in time of peace, shall enjoy complete immunity from attack or injury by belligerents, and from acts calculated to impair their usefulness as part of the ca.n.a.l.

4. It is agreed that no change of territorial sovereignty or of international relations of the country or countries traversed by the before-mentioned ca.n.a.l shall affect the general principle of neutralization or the obligation of the high contracting parties under the present treaty.

5. The present treaty shall be ratified by the President of the United States by and with the advice and consent of the Senate thereof, and by His Britannic Majesty; and the ratifications shall be exchanged at Washington or at London at the earliest possible time within six months from the date thereof.

APPENDIX II.

THE PANAMA DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, 1903.

The transcendental act that by a spontaneous movement the inhabitants of the isthmus of Panama have just executed is the inevitable consequence of a situation which has become graver daily.

Long is the recital of the grievances that the inhabitants of the isthmus have suffered from their Colombian brothers; but those grievances would have been withstood with resignation for the sake of harmony and national union had its separation been possible and if we could have entertained well-founded hopes of improvement and of effective progress under the system to which we were submitted by that republic. We have to solemnly declare that we have the sincere and profound conviction that all the hopes were futile and useless, all the sacrifices on our part.