Frederic J. Haskin

“ Besides these structures there still remain the locks and spillways, with their four and a half million cubic yards of concrete and their hundreds and thousands of tons of steel.
With all these astonishing comparisons in mind, is it strange that the digging of the Panama Canal is the world's greatest engineering project? Are they not enough to stamp it as the greatest single achievement in human history? Yet even they, pregnant of meaning as they are, fail to reveal the full and true proportions of the work of our illustrious army of canal diggers. ”

“ The celebration of the completion of the Suez [378] Canal was the wildest orgy of modern times, the last attempt to Orientalize a commercial undertaking of the Age of Steam and Steel.
The celebration at San Francisco will be more magnificent in its way, and will cost more money. But the millions will not be thrown away for the mere delectation of the senses of two score princes—they will be expended for the entertainment and the education of millions of people, the humblest of whom will have his full share in the celebration. ”

“ In Porto Rico one may see the benefits of the institution of a really good government, and the success which attends a proper effort to develop natural resources in tropical America. If American opportunities in all Latin America may be measured by American successes in that island, then, indeed, the future is rich with promise. During a single decade the external commerce of this little gem of the West Indies was more than quadrupled. It now amounts to some $80,000,000 a year, and only about 12 other countries in the world buy more goods from the American manufacturer. ”

“ But President Roosevelt was most unwilling to accept the alternative given him by Congress—that of undertaking the canal at Nicaragua—and this unwillingness, to say the least, encouraged a revolution in Panama. This revolution separated the Isthmus from the Republic of Colombia, and set up the new Republic of Panama. As a matter of fact, Panama had had but the slenderest relations with the Bogota Government, had been for years in the past an independent State, had never ceased to assert its own sovereignty, and had been, indeed, the theater of innumerable revolutions. ”

“ Whatever the ultimate conclusion, it seems useless to hope for prosperity and expansion in countries whose industries constantly suffer from the galling blight of ever-recurring revolution. The great problem that lies before the American people, if the Latin America of the future is to become like the Anglo-Saxon America of today, is that of devising a policy which will insure conditions of peace and good will in the several sword-ruled countries south of the Rio Grande. ”

“ The people would rebel against the severity of the regulations and against the incidental invasion of their privacy. But strike any community, however free, with the fear of a swift and deadly disease and it will submit—as witness the shot-gun quarantines that used to demark the northern limits of the yellow fever zone in our own Southern States, or the despotism that governed New Orleans in the terror of 1905. At Panama this fear is ever present, so there is little danger that a responsible majority there ever would resist the sanitary work on the grounds of outraged democracy. ”

“ And those who know the spirit of the people of California, who are immediately responsible to the United States and to the world for the success of the undertaking, understand that nothing will be overlooked that might please the eye, stir the fancy, or arouse the patriotism of those who journey to the Golden Gate to behold the wonders of this great show. ”

“ One cannot escape asking the question how it is that if the Panama Railroad commissary could pay approximately 12 cents a pound for dressed beef at New York, deliver it in refrigeration at Cristobal, thence to the housewife by train and wagon, and make a gross profit of some 26 per cent by the operation, that the American retail butcher can reasonably claim that at the price he sells his meat he is making little or no net profit.
One finds the same scale of prices on other commodities at Panama as meats. Only the very best goods are handled in the commissary. ”

“ And, long after Gatun Dam and Culebra Cut cease to be marvels, long after the Panama Canal becomes as much a matter of course as the Suez Canal, men still will be thrilled and impressed by the wonderful machinery of the locks—those great water stairways, operated by machinery as ingenious as gigantic, and holding in check with their mighty gates such floods as never elsewhere have been impounded. ”

“ Not only were the Americans determined that the money voted for the canal should be honestly and economically expended, but they were determined, also, that the workers on the canal should be well paid and well cared for. To this end they paid not only higher wages than were current at home for the same work, but they effectively shielded the workers from the exactions and extortions of Latin and Oriental merchants by establishing a commissary through which the employees were furnished wholesome food at reasonable prices—prices lower, indeed, than those prevailing at home. ”

“ As one travels along the Pacific end of the canal he is reminded of the words of Isaiah:
"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain."
Hundreds of acres of low, marshy land have been filled up, either with mud from the suction dredges and the hydraulic excavators, or with spoil from Culebra Cut. Much of this made land will be valuable for tropical agriculture, while other parts will never serve any purpose other than to keep down the marshes. ”

“ In the market he finds for food only the rotten salt fish or meat, cod fish covered with gangrenish splotches, and Indian rice; he that harvests the best coffee in the world, who aids in gathering into the granary the sweetest grain in nature, and drives to pasture the beautiful young meat animals, can not carry to his lips a single slice of meat because the municipal exactions place it beyond his means, almost doubling the price of infected cod fish; coffee becomes to him an article of luxury because of its high price, and he can use only sugar laden with molasses and impurities. ”

“ Here Bluebeard's castle still stands a mute reminder of the romantic days when buccaneers dominated the Spanish Main.
The north coast of South America also expects to figure largely in the new commercial map. The northern cities of Venezuela are on the route from eastern South America through the canal, and on one of the natural routes from Pacific ports to Europe. Nowhere else in the world will one find a more delightful climate or a more picturesque city or scenery than in northern Venezuela. ”

“ Its magnitude, its awe-inspiring aspect as one navigates the channel between the two great hills which stand like sentinels above it, and the memory of the thousands of tons of dynamite, the hundreds of millions of money and the vast investment of brain and brawn required in its digging, all conspire to make the wonder greater. ”

“ Only the laborer, the son of our fields, one of the most unfortunate beings in the world, with the pallid face, the bare foot, the fleshless body, the ragged clothing, and the feverish glance, strolls indifferently with the darkness of ignorance in his eyes. ”

“ In five years a newer and a prouder San Francisco arose from the ashes of the old, and greeted the world as the highest example of municipal greatness to which a community can rise at times when nothing is left to man but hope, and that hope is half despair. ”

“ Seldom in the history of international relations has a controversy afforded more grounds for honest difference of opinion than the issue between the United States and Colombia, growing out of the revolution and formation of the new Republic of Panama. ”

“ But after all, the yellow fever panic of 1905 served a good purpose, for if the mosquito thereby secured a reopening of its case, it stirred the United States Government to give to the sanitary officers of the Canal Zone the powers they needed, and the means required to prove finally and forever in the court of last resort, the guilt of the mosquito, and to establish for once and all the method of combating its stealthy work.
The whole world recognizes the remarkable results in sanitary work that have been achieved at Panama. ”

“ Its ball room, opening on three sides to the breezes borne in from the Caribbean is a delight to the disciples of Terpsichore, while its open-air swimming pool, said to be the largest hotel swimming pool in the world, affords ideal facilities for those who otherwise would sigh for the surf. Persons who have visited every leading hotel in the New World, from the Rio Grande southward to the Strait of Magellan, say that it is without a superior in all that region and, perhaps, without an equal except for one in Buenos Aires. ”

“ The story of the greatest human migration of all the ages is told in vivid, incisive and picturesque style. The three centuries of this great world movement are spread out before the reader like a panoramic parade of all nations. ”

“ The people were given free transportation over the Panama Railroad, and usually were allowed from $50 to $100 for their homes. They preferred to move in colonies, so the Republic of Panama laid out small towns away from the Canal Zone for them. These natives, usually almost full-blooded Indians, were treated as kindly and as considerately as conditions would allow. They were willing to "fold their tents" like the Arabs, and leave their homes behind as they went out to conquer new ones in the jungles where the needs of a gigantic waterway could not encroach upon them. ”

“ One needs only to study the distribution of humanity over the countries of the earth to find how unevenly the population is scattered, and to learn what great tides of immigration will have to flow westward to establish the equilibrium of population, which some day is bound to come. When Asia has a population of 50 per square mile and Europe a population of [353] 100 a square mile, while North America has 15 and South America has 7, it is apparent that the future holds great changes in store. The potential development of the two Americas challenges the imagination. ”

“ The building of a number of roads along the canal to facilitate the movement of military forces has made it possible to get a satisfactory use of automobiles. Agencies already have been opened for a number of the lower-priced cars in anticipation that a large number of the canal employees will buy automobiles in order to get the benefit of these good roads. There are few places where automobiling affords more pleasant diversion than at Panama. After the sun goes down the evenings are just cool enough and the breezes just strong enough to make an automobile ride a delightful experience. ”

“ The European usually goes into these countries because there are few opportunities at home. He is usually representative of the best citizenship of his homeland, and quite as much the gentleman in Latin America as at home. While there are a great many splendid types of American citizenship scattered throughout Latin America, a greater number of people have gone there because they could not get along in the United States, and their hostile attitude toward the natives excites by far more prejudice than the better class of Americans can counteract by sympathy and good feeling. ”