South America Observations and Impressions. Viscount James Bryce

collectivism but military autocracy.

      In these wire nettings and drainage arrangements and hospital precautions, to which I have referred, more than in anything else is to be found the reason why, after the French effort to build the canal had twice failed, the present enterprise is succeeding. The French engineers had shown great skill and were doing their work well. No one admits their merits more fully than do, with the generous candour that belongs to true soldiers and true men of science, the American engineers who have come after them. But they had no means of fighting the yellow fever and the malaria that were frustrating all their skill and exhausting all their resources. The discovery, made while the United States troops were occupying Cuba after the war of 1898, that yellow fever is due to the bite of the Stegomyia carrying infection from a patient to a healthy person, and that intermittent fevers are due to the bite of the Anopheles, similarly bearing poison from the sick to the sound, made it possible to enter on a campaign for the prevention of these diseases among the workers on the Isthmus. This was done before excavation began, and done so efficiently that the Isthmus is now as healthy as any part of the United States. No case of yellow fever has occurred since 1905. The mortality is no higher than in the United States army generally. In 1910 the death rate among 50,802 employés of both colours in the Canal Zone was 10.98 per thousand, in 1911, among 48,876, it was 11.02, – an extraordinarily low rate when compared with the average of European and North American cities. Among the American white employés and their families the rate was only 6.01.7 The white employés and their families are healthy and fresh-looking, with none of that sickly brownish-yellow hue which usually marks the inhabitants of malarial districts. And I can confirm what many other visitors have told me, that one may be for days and nights on the Isthmus and neither see nor hear nor feel a mosquito. To have made one of the pest-houses of the world, a place with a reputation like that of the Pontine Marshes, or Poti on the Black Sea, or Sierra Leone itself, as healthy as Boston or London is an achievement of which the American medical staff, and their country for them, may well be proud; and the name of Colonel Gorgas, the head of that medical staff to whose unwearied zeal and care this achievement is largely due, deserves to stand on the roll of fame beside that of Colonel Goethals, the chief engineer and Chairman of the Commission, who has directed, and is bringing to its successful issue, this whole great enterprise.

      The sanitation of the Canal Zone, following that of Havana, has done more than make possible the piercing of the Isthmus. It has opened up possibilities for the settlement by Europeans of, and for the maintenance of permanent European population in, many tropical districts hitherto deemed habitable by their natives only. To the effect of such an example one can hardly set bounds.

      In no previous age could an enterprise so vast as this have been carried through; that is to say, it would have required a time so long and an expenditure so prodigious that no rational government would have attempted it. Pharaoh Necho may have, as Herodotus relates, dug a canal across the Isthmus of Suez by the labour of hundreds of thousands of his subjects accustomed to implicit obedience, but his ditch was probably a small and shallow one, and it was through a dead level of sand and clay that it was dug. Here there was a mountain to pierce and a torrent to bridle, and the locks had to provide for vessels a thousand feet long. Nothing but the new forces which scientific discovery has placed in the hands of the modern engineer – steam, electricity, explosives of high power, machinery capable of raising and setting in their place one above another huge masses of cement – would have made the work possible. Yet even that was not enough. The French company possessed such appliances, and though their estimates of cost turned out to be based on totally inadequate data, the competence and energy of their engineers have never been questioned. And the French company failed hopelessly; and failed not merely because the work turned out heavier, and the loose strata giving way under the downpours of rain made the slides and landslips far worse, than was expected.8 These things doubtless told against them, and much of the money raised never found its way to the Isthmus. But it was a more terrible force that foiled them. It was Pestilence, Pestilence coming on the gauzy wings of the mosquito. So little did they recognize their foe that when they built the large and commodious hospital at Ancon they provided, outside the windows, flower-boxes where stagnant water gathered and mosquitoes were hatched. Engineers died, foremen died, labourers were mown down by hundreds. Yet even if all the French capital had been properly spent and better sanitary measures had reduced the pestilential conditions, it may be doubted whether the French company could have made a success of the undertaking. More capital would have been needed, capital which must have been raised on onerous terms, and when it had all been spent and the work completed the profits of the canal could not, after providing for working expenses, have paid interest on half of the money borrowed. Whoever looks at this prodigious work feels that it could be carried through only by a nation commanding resources so overflowing that it does not need to care how much it spends, a nation which can borrow as much money as it pleases without sensibly affecting the quotations of its existing national debt.

      It is expected that the construction of the Canal will be found, when it is finished, to have cost nearly £80,000,000 ($400,000,000).9 To this there will have to be added the cost of the fortifications it is intended to erect at Colon and on the islands that lie in the Gulf of Panama, opposite the south end of the Canal, as well as of barracks for the large garrison which is to defend it. The visitor who sees the slopes where these forts and batteries are to be placed asks who are the enemies whom it is desired to repel. Where is the great naval power that has any motive either of national enmity or of self-interest sufficient to induce it to face the risks of a war with a country so populous, so wealthy, and so vigorous as the United States? He is told that there is at present no such naval power, and that no quarter can be indicated whence danger will arise; but that it is possible that at some future time, from some unknown direction, some yet unconjectured enemy may arise against whose possible attacks provision ought now to be made.

      When the Canal has been opened and the interest now felt in getting it completed by the appointed day has ended, hardly less keen will be the interest in that other question on which men have speculated so long. What difference will this new waterway from ocean to ocean make to world commerce and therewith also, though probably in a less degree, to world politics? And what difference, to descend to smaller matters, will it make to the West Indies, and to the ports of the Gulf of Mexico, and (not so much commercially as politically) to the neighbouring states of Central and South America? The political side of the matter is one too delicate to be discussed here, but upon the commercial one a word or two may be said.

      The new route will doubtless become an important route for the traffic in heavy freight from the Atlantic ports of the United States, and from European ports also, to the ports of western North America.

      It will similarly become the main freight line for goods of all kinds from both European and eastern North American ports to the west coast of South America as far south as Callao, and also from Gulf of Mexico ports as far as Coquimbo or Valparaiso. Whether the freight traffic from Europe to Valparaiso and the other ports of Chile will be greatly affected, is deemed more doubtful. Much will, of course, depend on the tolls fixed for transit through the Canal, which, by the treaty of 1901 between Great Britain and the United States, are to be, like those at Suez, equal between all nations.

      The most interesting, because the largest, and also the most doubtful and complicated, question is as to the result upon European commerce to the Far East, – Japan, China, New Zealand, and Australia. It is the most complicated, because many factors enter into it, some of them political as well as commercial. Here the Canal will compete with the Suez Canal route, and (as respects Australia in particular) with the Cape of Good Hope route, and it will also compete with the steamship lines which now ply from Australia and New Zealand to England round Cape Horn. From England to all the Australasian and east Asiatic ports, except those of New Zealand, the Suez route will be shorter than that by Panama.10 From New York, however, the route by Panama to Sydney, Auckland (New Zealand), and Shanghai will be shorter than that via Suez, while to Hong Kong and Manila it will be of practically the same length. It is generally supposed that the Panama tolls will be lower than those now imposed at Suez. Commerce, like other things, changes more quickly in our age than it

7

Among the white population of the Zone, excluding the cities of Panama and Colon, the rate was higher, viz. 16.47 for 1910 and 15.32 for 1911, the part of the population not under official control being less careful to observe health rules.

8

Fascinated by the example of Suez, and not realizing how greatly the problem of construction was affected by the difference between the very wet climate of Panama and the absolutely dry climate of Suez, the French engineers originally planned a sea-level canal. To have carried out that plan would have added enormously to the cost, for the Culebra cutting must have been not only eighty feet deeper, but immensely wider. Few who examine the spot seem now to doubt that the decision to have a lock canal has been a wise one.

9

The last estimate presented puts the amount at $375,000,000. The fortifications are expected to cost about $12,000,000 more.

10

London to Sydney via Suez 11,531 miles, via Panama 12,525; London to Auckland via Suez 12,638 miles, via Panama, 11,404.