The Pacific coasts both of the United States and of South and Central America will be quickened into new life when the stream of commerce begins to flow through the new channel at Panama. It may be wise to lay emphasis at this point upon the fact that so far as industrial and commercial life on our own Pacific coast is concerned it needs little quickening, as the march to civic greatness of those communities has been unparalleled. But even that magnificent advance has been impeded and harassed by the difficulty of communication with the markets of the Atlantic coast. The struggles of the Pacific coast planters and lumbermen to break the bondage imposed upon them by the railroads have been fairly frantic, and their uniform failure pathetic. Perhaps the railroad managers have demanded no more than a rightful care for the interests of their stockholders warranted. This is no place to argue the railroad rate question. But from the shipper’s point of view the demands have been so intolerable that every expedient for resisting them has been tried and failed. Even now there is profit to a corporation—and to the shippers that patronize it—in carrying goods from San Francisco to Hawaii, thence to Tehuantepec and across that Isthmus to the Gulf and thence again to New York in competition with the direct railroad lines. If freight can be thus handled profitably, with two changes from ship to car and vice versa, it is easy to see how vastly beneath the charges of the railroads will be the all-water route between New York and San Francisco. It is little exaggeration to say that for commercial purposes all the Pacific seaboard will be brought as near New York and European markets as Chicago is today. The forward impetus given by this to the commercial interests of the Pacific baffles computation.

But it is Latin America that has reason to look forward with the utmost avidity to the results that will follow the opening of the Canal. For the people of that little developed and still mysterious coast line reaching from the United States-Mexico boundary, as far south at least as Valparaiso, the United States has prepared a gift of incalculable richness. Our share in the benefit will come in increased trade, if our merchants seize upon the opportunity offered.

From Liverpool to Valparaiso today is 8747 miles and from New York 8380. But when the ships go through the Canal the English vessels will save little. For them the run will be reduced to 7207 miles, while from New York the distance will be cut to 4633. With such a handicap in their favor New York shippers should control the commerce of Pacific South America north of Valparaiso. Guayaquil, in Ecuador, will be but 2232 miles from New Orleans; it has been 10,631. Callao, with all Peru at its back, will be 3363 miles from New York, 2784 from New Orleans. In every instance the saving of distance by the Panama route is more to the advantage of the United States than of Great Britain. Today the lion’s share of the commerce of the South American countries goes to England or to Germany.

North of the Canal are the Central American countries of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. On their Gulf coasts harbors are infrequent and poor, but on the Pacific plentiful. Their territory is as yet little developed, but with few manufacturers of their own they offer a still undeveloped market for ours. In all, the twelve Latin-American countries bordering on the Pacific have an area of over 2,500,000 square miles, or about that of the United States exclusive of Alaska and its insular possessions. They have a population of 37,000,000 and their foreign trade is estimated at $740,000,000. In this trade the United States is at the present time a sharer to the extent of $277,000,000 or about 37 per cent. With the Canal in operation it is believed that the total commerce will be doubled and the share of the United States raised to 50 per cent.

However, it is the great Australasian and Asiatic markets, now scarcely touched about the outskirts, to which the Canal will give the readiest access. Here other nations will profit equally with ours unless our merchants show a greater energy in the pursuit of foreign trade than they have of late years. Time was that the old shipping merchants of Boston, Philadelphia and New York asked odds of no man nor of any nation, but had their own ships plying in the waters of all the world, with captains who were at once navigators and traders—equally alert to avoid a typhoon and to secure a profitable cargo or charter. But that sort of foreign trade is now vanished with the adventurous spirits who pursued it. Unless conditions governing the American merchant marine materially change within the next two years—of which there seems today no likelihood—it will be England and Germany with their existing lines of ships that will chiefly benefit by the United States $400,000,000 gift to the commerce of the world.

Curiously enough New York, or for that matter any North Atlantic seaport of the United States, is in a sort a way station for ships from Europe to North Asiatic ports. In navigation the straight course is not always the shortest course, for the very simple reason that the equator is the longest way around the world. On account of the curvature of the earth’s surface a vessel from Liverpool to Hamburg to the Panama Canal by following the great circle route can make New York a stopping-place by adding only one day’s steaming to the voyage. On the other hand a vessel en route from Panama to Yokohama can touch at San Diego and San Francisco with only two days’ extra steaming. These facts make for the advantage of the shipper by adding to the vigor of competition for cargoes, but they add to the fierceness of the rivalry which the American ship owner will have to meet and for which the kindly government prepares him by forcing him to buy his ships in the costliest market and operate them in accordance with a hampering and extravagant system of navigation laws.

The ease however with which English or German ships en route to the Far East may touch at New York, Boston or Philadelphia will doubtless divert to Panama some of the traffic that would find a shorter through route via Suez. For example, from Liverpool to Melbourne is 1312 miles less via Suez than by way of Panama, while to Hongkong it is 694 miles less. Yet it is quite conceivable that the advantage of taking New York or other United States Atlantic ports on the way may secure some of this traffic for Panama.

The really striking saving in time and distance is shown by a comparison of the present distances between our Atlantic coast towns and Australasia and the Orient. Prof. Johnson has put this in two compact tables, which I quote from The Scientific American:

So far as Asiatic traffic is concerned, there is almost sure to be some overlapping of routes. Conditions other than those of time and space will occasionally control shipmasters in the choice of a route. But so far as the trade of our Atlantic ports with Hongkong, the Philippines and points north and east thereof is concerned it will all go through Panama. So, too, with the vessels from English, French or German ports. If the contemplated economies offered by the price of coal and fuel oil at Balboa are effected, the inducements of this route will divert from Suez all European shipping bound for Asiatic ports north of India. A careful study of the Suez Canal shows that the trade of the United States with all foreign countries made up 33 per cent of the total traffic, and the commerce of Europe with the west coast of South America comprised 38 per cent. Col. Johnson compiled for the benefit of the Commission a table which showed the vessels which might advantageously have used the Canal in 1909 and 1910, and accompanied it with another giving his estimate of the amount of shipping that actually will use the Canal in 1915 and thereafter. As the expression of official opinion based upon the most careful research, these tables are here republished.

CLASSIFICATION OF ESTIMATED NET TONNAGE OF SHIPPING USING THE PANAMA CANAL IN 1915, 1920 AND 1925

NET TONNAGE OF VESSELS THAT MIGHT HAVE ADVANTAGEOUSLY USED A PANAMA CANAL IN 1909-10.

Note.—(1) Reported by Suez Canal Company; hence the total is not separable into entrances and clearances at American ports.

After all, however, the most patient investigation of the past and the most careful and scientific calculations of the probabilities of the future may produce a wholly inaccurate result. The real effect of the Canal on the world’s commerce may be something wholly different from what the experts expect. But we may proceed upon the well-established fact that no new route of swifter and cheaper transportation ever failed to create a great business, and to develop thriving communities along its route. This fact finds illustration in the building up of the suburbs and back country by the development of trolley lines, and, on a larger scale, the prodigious growth of our Pacific coast after the transcontinental railroads had fought their way to every corner of that empire still in the making. Much is uncertain about what the Panama Canal will do for the expansion of our trade and influence, but the one thing that is certain is that no sane man is likely to put the figures of increase and extension too high.

More and more the exports of the United States are taking the form of manufactured goods. The old times when we were the granary of the world are passing away and the moment is not far distant when we shall produce barely enough for our rapidly increasing population. British Columbia is taking up the task of feeding the world where we are dropping it. On the other hand, our manufacturing industry is progressing with giant strides and, while a few years ago our manufacturers were content with their rigidly protected home market, they are now reaching out for the markets of foreign lands. Figures just issued show that in 10 years our exports of manufactured goods have increased 70 per cent. The possibilities of the Asiatic market, which the Canal brings so much more closely to our doors, are almost incalculable. For cotton goods alone China and India will afford a market vastly exceeding any which is now open to our cotton mills, and if, as many hold, the Chinese shall themselves take up the manufacture of the fleecy staple they will have to turn to New England and Pennsylvania for their machinery and to our cotton belt of states for the material. The ships from Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans and Galveston, which so long steamed eastward with their cargoes of cotton, will in a few years turn their prows toward the setting sun. Indeed these southern ports should be among the first to feel the stimulating effect of the new markets. Southern tobacco, lumber, iron and coal will find a new outlet, and freight which has been going to Atlantic ports will go to the Gulf—the front door to the Canal.

How swiftly and efficiently American manufacturers and jobbers will seize upon the new conditions and avail themselves of this opening of new fields is yet to be determined. The enemies of a protective tariff are not the only ones who hold that it has had the result of dulling the keen spirit of adventurous enterprise for which our people were once noted. The absolute possession of a home market ever growing in size and into which no foreigner could enter with any hope of successful competition has naturally engaged at home the attention of our captains of industry. Bold and dashing spirits of the sort that one hundred years ago were covering the seas with Baltimore clippers and the output of the New England shipyards turned their attention half a century ago to the building of railroads and the development of our western frontier. When the middle-aged men of today were boys, the heroes of their story books ran away to sea and after incredible adventures came home in command of clipper ships trading to China. Today the same class of fiction starts the aspiring boy in as a brakeman or a mill hand and he emerges as a railroad president or the head of a great manufacturing industry.