Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

If the system and conditions of employment that have existed in Panama could be applied to public service in all other parts of the United States, the condition of all labor, all industry, all professional service would be correspondingly improved. For with the most extensive employer setting the pace all others would have to keep step with it.

When the long account comes to be balanced we may find that the United States will owe quite as much to the Panama enterprise on the moral as on the material side. Of course it is going to increase our trade both foreign and domestic—that, as the French say, goes without saying. It will cheapen the cost of building cottages in New York suburbs, because lumber will be brought from the forests of Oregon and Washington for half the freight cost now exacted. It will stimulate every manufacturing interest on the Pacific coast for coal from West Virginia will be laid down there at dollars per ton less than now. The men who catch and can salmon in the rushing waters of the Columbia, the men who raise and pack the luscious oranges of southern California will have a new and cheaper way of carrying their products to the eager markets of the great cities along the Atlantic coast. At the same time the output of our eastern steel mills and New England cotton and woolen factories will find a more expeditious and cheaper route to the builders and workers of the Pacific coast.

Incidentally the labors of the Interstate Commerce Commission are likely to be multiplied almost incalculably. For it must be accepted as a fact that free competition is no longer a complete regulator of freight rates whether by rail or by water. Any one can charter a ship and send it through the Canal with the same rights and privileges that a long established line will enjoy. But not every independent ship can find dockage facilities at both ends of its voyage, although it is true that the enterprising cities of the Pacific coast are warding off monopoly by building municipal docks. Moreover, the owner of the independent ship will have his troubles in getting the railroads at either end to handle his cargoes and distribute them at such charges as will leave him any profit. Indeed the independent ship will be but little of a factor in fixing rates. That will be done by the regular lines. Normally there should be keen competition between the railroads and the steamships with a very marked drop in rates. But it will not be well to base too great hopes on this possibility. Transportation rates, even where there is nominally free competition, are not often based wholly on the cost of the service. What the traffic will bear is more often the chief factor in rate making. Because ships can carry freight from New York to San Francisco for three dollars a traffic-ton less than the railroads does not imply that they will do so. Nor does it ensure that railroad rates will drop spasmodically in a vain effort to keep all the business away from the ships. Rather is it probable that certain classes of freight like lumber, coal and ore will be left wholly to the ships, and some form of agreement as to the essentials of the general rate card will be arrived at. It is this agreement, which in some form or other is sure to come, that will engage the attention of the Interstate Commerce Commission, arouse its ceaseless vigilance and probably necessitate a material extension of its authority.

In other than material ways the nation will largely profit. I think that the fact of the Canal’s having been built by army engineers will go far toward correcting a certain hostility toward the army which is common in American thought. The Canal proves that the organization of the army, the education of its officers, is worth something in peace as well as in war. Of course this has been shown before in countless public works scattered over the land, but never hitherto in a fashion to command such attention and to compel such plaudits. There were five Colonels, besides “The Colonel,” on the Commission which put the big job through, and I do not believe that the most shrinking civilian who visited the Isthmus on either business or pleasure found any ground to complain of militarism, or was overawed by any display of “fuss and feathers.”

The Canal Zone was, of course, a rural community harboring about 65,000 people scattered along a railroad 47 miles long. Yet in the story of its government there is much that is instructive to the rulers of our American cities. Every head of the Department of Sanitation in an American city would profit by a study of Col. Gorgas’s methods in dealing with the problems of dirt, sewage, and infection. Indeed many of the ideas he developed are already being adapted to the needs of North American municipalities. It is becoming quite evident that the scientific method of controlling insect pests by destroying their breeding places is the only efficient one. The larvacide man in the waste places, or the covered garbage can, and screened stable are not as melodramatic as newspaper shrieks of “Swat the Fly”, but they accomplish more in the end.

The management of the Panama Railroad by and for the government affords an object lesson that will be cited when we come to open Alaska. Though over-capitalized in the time of its private ownership and operation the railroad under the direction of Col. Goethals has paid a substantial profit. Though rushed with the work incident to the Canal construction it has successfully dealt with its commercial business, and has offered in many ways a true example of successful railway management.

But to my mind more important than any other outcome of the Canal work, is its complete demonstration of the ability of the United States to do its own work for its own people, efficiently, successfully and honestly. That is an exhibit that will not down. The expenditure of fully $375,000,000 with no perceptible taint of graft is a victory in itself. There are exceedingly few of our great railroad corporations that can show as clean a record, and the fact somewhat depreciates the hostility of some of their heads to the extension into their domain of the activities of the government. In urging this point no one can be blind to the fact that the Zone was governed and the Canal work directed by an autocrat. But the autocrat was directly subject to Congress and had to come to that body annually for his supplies of money. It was dug by the army, but no one now doubts that the navy could have done as well, and few will question that, with the Panama experience as a guide, a mixed commission of civilians and military and naval officers could efficiently direct any public work the nation might undertake.

So with the Panama Canal approaching completion we can see that its effects are to be manifold—domestic as well as foreign, moral as well as material, political as well as economic. If it be properly conducted in its completed state, managed and directed upon the broad principle that, though paid for wholly by the United States, it is to exist for the general good of all mankind, it should be, in the ages to come, the greatest glory attached to the American flag. In abolishing human slavery we only followed last in the train of all civilized nations. But in tearing away the most difficult barrier that nature has placed in the way of world-wide trade, acquaintance, friendship and peace, we have done a service to the cause of universal progress and civilization the worth of which the passage of time will never dim.

Early in the afternoon of October 10, 1913, President Wilson, standing in the executive offices of the White House, pressed a telegrapher’s key. Straightway a spark sped along the wires to Galveston, Tex., thence by cable to the Canal Zone and, in an instant, with a roar and a quaking of the earth a section of the Gamboa Dyke, which from the beginning has barred the waters of Gatun Lake from the Culebra Cut, was blown away. The water gushed through, though not in such a torrent as sightseers had hoped for, since pumps, started on Oct. 1st, had already filled the cut to within six feet of the level of the lake. But presently thereafter a native cayuca, and then a few light power boats sped through the narrow opening, and there remained no obstacle to the passage of the canal by such light craft from ocean to ocean.

By the destruction of the Gamboa Dyke on the date fixed Colonel Goethals carried out a promise he had made long before to himself and to the people. It was on the 10th of October, 1513, that Balboa strode thigh-deep into the Pacific Ocean, and, raising on high the standard of Spain, claimed that sea and all countries abutting upon it for his sovereign. The United States just four centuries later celebrated one of the final steps in opening to the commerce of all the world the water-way between the oceans.

The demolition of Gamboa Dyke was the culmination of a series of steps forward toward the completion of the canal during the first week in October. On the 26th of September the first vessel was raised from the Atlantic level through the three steps of the Gatun locks to Gatun Lake. There was no particular pomp or ceremony observed. The craft was merely an humble tug employed regularly in canal work. Indeed it is said that it was not at “the colonel’s” initiative that the ceremony of having Gamboa Dyke blown up by wire from the White House was observed. That quiet but efficient army engineer signalized his service on the canal rather by doing things than by celebrating them when done.

From the Pacific end the first lockage was effected on October 14, when the tug Miraflores with two barges was put through the Miraflores locks, and floated on Lake Miraflores. The locks at Pedro Miguel were in condition to elevate the boats to the level of Culebra Cut, but there was not at he moment enough water in the cut to receive and float them.

Not long before the first lockages to the level of Gatun Lake there occurred very great activity of the Cucaracha slide, filling the canal bed from side to side. As a result no actual passage of the entire canal was then possible for boats of commercial size. The material thus blocking the cut is mainly soft earth, and suction dredges were speedily installed by which it was pumped out and deposited behind the hills bordering the canal and nearly two miles away.

When the Gamboa Dyke was blown away the villages on the south side of the canal became wholly inaccessible. Culebra, Matachin, Empire, Gorgona,—all stirring towns during the busy days of canal construction,—could no longer be reached by railroad, and their abandonment, determined upon long before, became final. The houses which had been the admiration of all visitors to the Zone were taken down in sections and removed to sites of the new towns which the commission intends shall be permanent. Culebra lasted longest, as it could still be reached by shuttle trains crossing the canal on a precarious bridge near the Pedro Miguel locks; but it in the end vanished with the rest.

There remain no epoch-making events to be celebrated in the progress of the canal to completion. As the dredges make further inroads upon the Cucaracha slide, larger and larger vessels will pass through, without ceremony, until the canal is open to all. The final celebration, January 1, 1915, will not precede but follow long after the actual employment of the canal by the commerce of all nations.