Before the Canal Is Opened

NEXT year, if all goes well, the Panama Canal will be opened. The dream of four centuries will be realized, the greatest engineering task of our time accomplished, and the Pacific and Atlantic made one.

You can see now the great ships moving through, — flags flying and bands playing, — where yesterday the lonely traveler hurried across the treacherous jungle with a shiver, and looked behind him for the enemy lurking in every shadow. You can almost hear the rumble and hum of that mighty spirit — our tremendous and baffling modern spirit — which, with all its superficial hardness and irreverence, works miracles of practical humanity that the old days never knew or dreamed of.

The gate will open between two happy oceans, new friendliness with our South American neighbors will begin to stir, new streams of north and south trade to flow. But — there will be one discord in the harmony of the cosmic lute. The nation nearest to the Canal, the one, indeed, through whose land it was built, will not join in the common song.

There are more poets in Colombia, perhaps, than in all South America put together, but none of them will sing of the steam-shovels or of the triumphs of modern engineers. The journalists of Bogotá write better Spanish, perhaps, than do those of Santiago or Buenos Aires, but they will speak of us only as the ‘Hannibal at our Gates,’ or the ‘Yanki Huns and Vandals.’ Colombia is nearer to us in actual miles than any other South American country. In her cities are people as cultured and charming as any in Latin America. She has coffee, sugar, cocoa, rubber, woods, cattle, minerals, and vast undeveloped resources that need our machinery and capital and creative energy. Naturally, we should be the best of friends.

Yet the Canal, far from bringing Colombia nearer, has only pushed her farther away. She is more remote than she was fifty years ago, when a progressive Colombian turned instinctively to the United States for examples of the humanity, tolerance, and progress he would have his countrymen emulate; more remote than she was when Santiago fell, in our war with Spain, and the people of Bogotá came crowding about the American legation to cheer our minister and our flag.

It is a long way from the Isthmus up to Bogotá, and the thrill of achievement there dies out before it has crossed the intervening jungles and mountains. The Colombians do not feel it at all. They know that the Isthmus is still on their coat-of-arms, but that the Isthmus itself is gone. They still, so it seems to them, have the treaty of 1846, according to which the United States guaranteed Colombia’s sovereignty over the Isthmus, and agreed that this promise should be ‘religiously observed.’ They have lost their sovereignty and the most valuable thing, potentially, that they owned, and they hate those responsible, as only a proud and helpless people can hate those by whom they believe they have been robbed.

This is a fact which Americans must face as they consider the possibilities which the Canal will bring. Whatever the original rights and wrongs of the question, this is a matter of present expediency which stands squarely in front of us now. The taking of the Isthmus is just as live an issue to-day in Colombia as it was nine years ago, when the famous ‘fifty-mile order’ was issued which prevented Colombia from putting down an uprising in her own territory, and made possible the recognition of the independence of Panama. Scarcely a day—certainly not a week — passes in Bogotá, in which it is not made the subject of more or less virulent editorials and the motive for misunderstanding and misrepresenting everything American.

And if it is a live issue for Colombians, it is no less so for every American who is trying to grow coffee or to raise cattle or to work a mine in Colombia, or who would like to venture his energy and capital and skill in the country’s development. This is a plain statement of fact, the common knowledge of all who have taken the trouble — as the writer has—to go down to Colombia and find out what Colombians and Americans living in, or interested in, Colombia think.

Of course history cannot be turned back. No sensible person thinks of giving up the Canal Zone. It is as much ours now, for all practical purposes, as if it had originally been a county of Massachusetts. The real issue is, what, if anything, is going to be done to remedy the intolerable condition which now exists between the theoretically friendly people of the United States and Colombia — a condition which affects our relations not only with Colombia, but with all Latin America?

From examination of this question, two influences, which have made up many people’s minds for them, had better be eliminated at once. It is not fair to assume that Colombia was right merely because Mr. Roosevelt — in such utterances, for instance, as ‘I took the Isthmus and let Congress debate’ — seemed, to many, wrong. Nor is it fair to assume that our moral debt to Colombia—if such existed — has been somehow wiped out by the brilliance of our mechanical achievement at Panama.

At the time that Colombia lost her province of Panama, people said — just as ninety-nine out of a hundred Americans will say to-day — that it was a ‘ pretty raw deal.’ They said this goodhumoredly, with a smiling shake of the head, implying their admiration for the man who ‘did things,’ and their guess that, after all, this one was somehow justified. The rawness of the deal was so generally admitted, indeed, that everything—short of granting Colombia’s request that the matter be submitted to The Hague—was done to neutralize it. Secretary of State Hay, in his letter to the Colombian minister, refusing this request , said that our government recognized ‘that Colombia has, as she affirms, suffered an appreciable loss,’ — this included not only the Isthmus itself, but her income of $250,000 a year from the Panama Railroad and the reversionary rights in the railroad, which was to become her property in 1967, — ‘and this government has no desire to increase or accentuate her misfortunes, but is willing to do everything in her power to ameliorate her lot.’

Mr. Root, the next Secretary of State, was sent on his splendid pilgrimage of conciliation all the way round South America. When this embassy of good-will really seemed to have accomplished something, and our brilliant successes on the Isthmus were an added cause for treating Colombia with the consideration due a weaker neighbor, through whose misfortune we had benefited, Mr. Roosevelt, speaking before the students of the University of California, made the astounding declaration that he had ignored precedent and simply taken the Isthmus. ‘If I had followed traditional conservative methods,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘I would have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to Congress, and the debate on it would have been going on yet. But I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate: and while the debate goes on the Canal does also.’

The effect of such a declaration, carrying all the force of the words of a chief executive and crystalizing instantly the vague distrust of the United States felt throughout the South American republics, need not be explained. To the inevitable protests which this speech brought out, Mr. Roosevelt replied that the taking of the Isthmus was ‘as free from scandal as the public acts of Washington or Lincoln’; that ‘every action taken was carried out in accordance with the highest, finest, and nicest standards of public and governmental ethics’; and that ‘any man who at any stage has opposed or condemned the action taken in acquiring the right to dig the Canal has really been the opponent of any and every effort that could ever have been made to dig the Canal.’

If there is any one thing true about the taking of the Isthmus, it is that it was an act of expediency about which serious Americans may legitimately differ. There were other ways in which the privilege of building a canal might have been acquired without virtually breaking a treaty and committing an act of war. Apart from the cruel discourtesy to a helpless neighbor, the assertion that those who disagreed with any detail of our government’s action in the matter, were opposed to the Canal itself, caused many otherwise cool-headed people simply to throw up their hands and assume the worst. While such assumptions are human, and not unnatural in those who fail to recall Mr. Roosevelt’s way of seeing all colors as either black or white, they are scarcely sound. If a lady is trying to commit a hold-up — and it is Colonel Roosevelt’s contention that Colombia was trying to hold up the United States — her moral guilt is not changed by the fact that she is lame and suffering from anaemia, and that her victim, after knocking her down and taking away her most valuable possession, concludes by enthusiastically jumping up and down on her neck.

As a matter of fact, as every one knows, our government was tried and exasperated beyond ordinary endurance. The shilly-shallying and inefficiency, to put it mildly, with which the negotiations were dragged along by Colombia would have weakened the patience of Job, let alone that of an impetuous altruist like our former President. Civilization, so to speak, was waiting; a work that would benefit the whole world was at stake. As grabs go, this was very mild, indeed; few treaty violations were ever so justified.

If it is unsound to assume, because of irrelevant prejudice, that Colombia is right, it is equally unsound to assume that the brilliance of our work on the Isthmus necessarily proves her wrong. You see that wonderful achievement, the keen, dependable men, pushing their work with as loyal a devotion as if they were soldiers carrying the flag into the enemy’s fire, until the least important Jamaica negro on the job has an air of personal pride and enthusiasm in the work. You see the jungle softened and made human until little stations along the railroad seem like pieces of Ohio or California. You catch the thrill of battle in the very air, and the thing sweeps you off your feet.

After all, what are the croaks of a few backward Colombians in the face of a thing like this? They never would have built the Canal. The Isthmus was worth nothing to them. Why waste time in sentimentality? The end justifies the means. The idea seems to be — and it is a new idea for Americans — that a moral wrong is righted provided the Gatun locks are built high enough; that sanitation can wipe out an unpaid debt; that if our honor has fallen, the famous steam-shovels of Bucyrus, Ohio, can shovel it up again.

This idea may be an accepted and, indeed, respectable one in many parts of the world. It has not, hitherto, been the American idea. I believe that very few Americans who know anything of their Latin American neighbors, or know what happened on the Isthmus, accept it at all. The difficulty here, as so often in the case of our relations with South Americans, is that people do not know.

There is no need of going back here over the long and complicated story. Both sides have been set forth with sufficient warmth, and more or less inaccuracy, in several magazines, and most of it can be found more fully told — and without the prejudice — in easily accessible Senate documents and records of foreign relations. Briefly, we wanted to build the Canal and to build it through the Isthmus. The Spooner law directed the President to take the Nicaragua route, if satisfactory arrangements could not be made with Colombia in ‘a reasonable time.’ And while it is not necessary to accept Colombia’s notion that the Spooner law was a mere political expedient to drive her to a bargain, it was generally known at the time that the President vastly preferred the Panama route.

Colombia, naturally, wanted the Canal built, too. She had wanted it for years and, long before the French undertook it, unsuccessfully tried to get us to build it. TheHay-Herran Treaty, apparently embodying her own suggestions of what the treaty should be, was drawn up and submitted to both governments. Our Senate ratified it, the Colombian Senate rejected it. That this was injudicious — however it may have been within Colombia’s legal rights — is generally admitted. Colombians themselves admit it; indeed, too late to do any good, they gladly would have passed it.

Mr. Roosevelt asserts that Colombia was trying to hold us up, and with characteristic informality describes the presidents of that country as a ‘succession of banditti’; a comment, by the way, which the Colombians — unaccustomed to employing, in public semi-official references about other nations, the colloquialisms used by stumpspeakers toward their opponents in the heat of political campaigns — accepted literally, and with complete seriousness. From this it was but a brief step to the popular assumption that an American president had called all Colombians bandits; so that now, in Bogotá, a charming young lady, pouring tea for her guests in her own drawing-room, will be pointed out to you with the ironical comment, ‘One of our banditti!’

The Colombians, on their side, say that the treaty called for an alienation of territory which was unconstitutional, and that they could not pass the treaty without first amending their constitution.

That the fairly evident determination of the United States — with its fabulous riches — to have the Isthmus at any price, may well have dazzled some of the Colombian statesmen, no one acquainted with the occasional weaknesses of our own boards of aldermen, and even legislatures, would venture to deny, whatever may have been the facts. On the other hand, the difficulties in the way of a prompt ratification of the treaty were much more than are realized by those unfamiliar with Colombian geography and politics, and the peculiar embarrassments of that time.

Colombia was staggering up from a civil war which had cost her nearly a hundred thousand lives, — in a condition of weakness and unrest from which she is just now beginning to get on her feet. The whole country was like an irritable, neurotic invalid. It was the most difficult thing in the world for any government to take such a vital step as that of surrendering the sovereignty of the Isthmus — and that is what perpetual control practically amounted to — without furnishing enough political capital to the opposition to start serious trouble.

Bogotá — which, so far as the government is concerned, is Colombia — is one of the remotest capitals in the world. It takes from ten days to a month for letters to get from the coast to the capital. News from the outside world comes only in the briefest roundabout cables, or in foreign newspapers a month old. That quick, journalistically intelligent public opinion which forms over night in a country like ours, is impossible there. It is a city of poets and politicians and wordy theorists; at once slow-moving and punctilious, and, because of the country’s isolation and weakness, sensitive and proud.

To acquire so valuable a possession as the Isthmus at such a time was a task calling for great patience, the nicest consideration, and understanding sympathy. If an ordinary drummer wants to sell a steam-pump to a Spanish-American, he knows that he must proceed with a certain courtesy and formality, which would be unnecessary at home. With what more than tact, whatever the incidental irritations, ought not a power like ours to have proceeded toward a helpless Latin neighbor with whom we were on terms of complete peace, whose sovereignty on the Isthmus we had guaranteed by a treaty ‘to be religiously observed,’ when we desired to acquire the most valuable thing she owned, and still to continue her friend.

What actually happened, of course everybody knows. Even before the Colombian Senate met to consider the treaty, Colombia was curtly warned that no amendments would be permitted. Three days after the treaty had been rejected the ‘ revolution ’ broke out in Panama. There had been many of these squabbles before, for the coast cities have always thought themselves ill-used by the central government, and while several other revolts would have given more ground for recognizing Panama’s independence, the landing of a few marines had sufficed to keep the railroad running without serious interruption.

Whether the squelching of this trouble would have been the few minutes’ work that Colombians believe, there is no definite means of knowing, inasmuch as the Colombian troops were not allowed to act. One day before the uprising, indeed, when nothing had occurred outwardly to change the friendly relations between Colombia and the United States, President Roosevelt had issued his ‘fifty-mileorder’ prohibiting the landing of the Colombian troops, not only on the Canal Zone, but wit hin fifty miles of Panama. The troops already within this zone were not allowed to proceed to Panama, and on November 6, less than two days after the rebels issued their proclamation of independence, the President recognized the new republic. A French citizen interested in the canal company was promptly received as Minister from Panama, and the money that was to have been paid to Colombia went to the revolutionists. And at the same time Colombia lost her annual income of $250,000 from the Panama Railroad and her reversionary rights in it, for it was to go to her outright in 1967.

In view of the frank ‘I took the Isthmus,’ it is unnecessary to indulge in academic theorizing over these astonishing events. And there is, indeed, much to be said by those who willingly grant that they constituted an act of war. It was by an act of war that we acquired Texas, for instance. This gave us practical ownership of the Zone, and it is undoubtedly more convenient to own a man’s land than to rent it, however advantageous the terms. Measured by the et hical standards accepted by powerful nations in the fight for trade and territory, rather than by those in use in civilized private life, or by what we like to think is the American spirit of justice and fair play, the coup d’état was a brilliant success.

Even from the point of view of expediency, however, it left something to be desired. We were able to start the Canal a little sooner than we could have done otherwise, and practically to own the Zone outright. But we made enemies of a people who had hitherto been our friends, and we aroused a distrust throughout Latin America. In Colombia itself, — the country nearest to us and the Canal, — few Americans would think now of investing their time or money. The American who ran the street railroad in Bogotá was forced by a boycott to sell out and leave the country. On the Magdalena River boats and in Bogotá, a few weeks since, I met Americans who had come to examine the country’s possibilities, — cattle-raising (to which the opening of the Canal ought to give a great boom), coffee, mining, and so on. They did not see how they could go ahead at present. The country has endless possibilities, its riches have scarcely been scratched, but no American, without unusual influence behind him, would care to risk investment until at least some sort of entente cordiale is arrived at.

Nor is it any less practical a matter for the American already on the ground. Suppose he owns a coffee plantation and his workmen get into trouble — as sometimes happens in these remote, sparsely-settled neighborhoods — with the workmen of a neighboring finca. One side knocks somebody down, somebody pulls a gun, before you know it there is a fine little row. In one such case I knew of, the squabble developed until the peons of one plantation regularly invaded the other and so frightened the workmen there that they left en masse. They had been brought down from the interior at considerable expense, and double wages had to be paid to fill their places. What chance has this American, or any American, in any of the hundred squabbles or contested issues that may arise, of getting justice?

These are practical matters, — things that make trouble for ministers and consuls, scare-head stories for newspapers, and now and then, in extreme cases, give cruisers their sailing orders. They, in themselves, are sufficient cause for our doing something to remedy the present intolerable situation, — with the Treaty of 1846, guaranteeing Colombia’s sovereignty in the Isthmus, still in force, so far as Colombia is concerned, while as a matter of concrete fact Panama is now a separate republic and the Canal Zone is ours.

It is the less concrete — what those who ignore Latin-American civilization will doubtless call the merely sentimental arguments — that seem to me strongest and most moving.

The present situation, no doubt, inconveniences a few American citizens. The real bitterness of the thing lies in the contrast between what might and ought to be the relations between this great, free, hopeful, kindly nation of ours and its struggling neighbor to the south, and what those relations are. We might be an inspiration and a help to Colombia; the different civilizations, temperaments, and ideals, no less than the different material resources, ought to meet and supplement one another; but how shabby and shameful is the true state of affairs!

Colombia is not, in some ways, a very pleasant place for Americans to visit to-day. With whatever personal courtesy the individual is received — and it is the same which he will meet all over South America — it is not an agreeable awakening to find America regarded, in the aggregate, much as the Finns or Persians regard Russia.

America seems very far away, in that venerable mountain capital, buried behind hundreds of miles of Andean walls and tropical rivers, from the sea and the northern world. Every one, as the saying goes, is a poet or a politician in Bogotá. There is plenty of time to read and write, to nourish and refine a grievance. Into that atmosphere of repose, of old-fashioned culture and courtesy, the warmth and kindness and beauty of our American life scarcely penetrate. Vaguely, threateningly, out of the distance, comes the dull roar of millions of machines, shrieking express-trains, avid, swarming, irreverent crowds, the hoarse breath of the ‘Giant of the North,’ as they call us, — a figure which suddenly took shape in the phrase, ‘I took the Isthmus,’ and was heard all up and down the Latin world.

You pick up your evening paper and learn that ‘the Americans, who have no ideal except that of the dollar, cannot understand how a poor people could be so foolish as not to sell their sovereignty for ten million dollars. For, of course, the Yankee nation, worshiping material success, ignorant of honor,’ and so on. Or there is a dispatch from Colon that the Americans are going to buy that city and add it to the Zone. Panama does not want to sell, but the United States insists on buying, and, of course, there’s an end of it. How convenient it would be if everybody could act in this way, if we all had money! A man goes to a widow for instance, and says, ‘I want to buy your house.’ The widow answers that she does not wish to sell her house, that she has lived in it for many years and is very fond of it. That, of course, makes no difference to the millionaire. ‘Sell me your house or I’ll take it!’ says he, and ‘I took the Isthmus!’ is quoted again.

Many of these papers are irresponsible wasps, which would sting their own kind as relentlessly, did we not offer an easier target. The free press in Latin America has a venomousness of which we know little at home — yet it undoubtedly reflects a bitterness and a conviction of injustice shared by every man, woman, and child, so to speak, in Colombia, who can think at all.

The precise form which any friendly agreement should take is a matter to be decided by statesmen, not by reporters. I am merely stating here a situation with which the average American does not concern himself, for the simple reason that generally he is not aware of it. Undoubtedly many Colombians have exaggerated notions of the indemnity which might be paid. To them the splendid ‘States’ look somewhat as the Twentieth Century Limited might look to a lame man on foot. A little steam clipped from that whizzing meteor, a few score millions more or less, would make all the difference in the world to Colombia, and would never be missed.

They are like one of their countrymen, an old government clerk, who came to one of our consuls. He had heard of the millions Rockefeller was giving away, and had written a long, ceremonious letter asking that a few thousands be set aside for him. ‘Is the letter properly written?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ replied our consul, ‘but I’m afraid you will never get the money.’ He explained that such sums were supervised by a committee of steelyhearted analysts, who scrutinized each application through a microscope, and probably would n’t be moved by the casual request of a perfectly healthy, and somewhat indolent, old gentleman of Colombia. The old clerk listened carefully, emitted a slow, sad ‘ Si ? ’ and shuffled away, tearing his letter into longitudinal strips.

Or, again, if an indemnity were paid for such concrete losses as that of the Panama Railroad, it would probably be desirable to appoint a non-partisan commission, and perhaps to specify the purpose for which the money was to be spent, — a railroad from Bogotá down to the Pacific, for instance, — in order that the country itself, and not merely its politicians, might be benefited. The boundary between Colombia and Panama is yet to be settled satisfactorily, — another business of such a treaty, — and the manner of conducting the whole negotiation from one side is almost as important as the matter of it. Certainly here is a case in which we ‘can afford to be generous’ — whether we are following mere expediency or a notion, perhaps archaic, of noblesse oblige. Nothing might come of our attempt, but we could at least show our South American neighbors and the world, that neither time nor the grim necessities of modern life have changed the American spirit of justice and fair play.