and on
November 18 signed at Washington a treaty with Panama granting the canal
concession. "I took Panama," boasted President Roosevelt some years
later, when critics denounced his policy as a robbery of a weak
neighbor.

The construction of a canal proceeded rapidly, once the diplomatic
entanglements had been brushed away. The incidental problems of
sanitation, labor, supplies, and engineering were solved promptly and
effectively. Congress poured money into the enterprise without
restraint, the first boats were passed through the locks in 1914, and in
1915 the formal opening of the canal was celebrated by a naval
procession at the Isthmus and an Exposition at San Francisco.

Vigor and certainty of purpose marked the conduct of domestic affairs as
well as foreign, but the necessity for the concurrence in these by
Congress made the former results less striking than the latter. The
appointments of President Roosevelt were such as might be expected from
one who had himself devoted six years to the Civil Service Commission.
Few of them met with opposition from the reform element. In the South he
became involved with local public opinion, especially in the cases of a
negro postmistress at Indianola, Mississippi, and the negro collector of
the port of Charleston, in which he maintained that although federal
appointments ought generally to go to persons acceptable in their
districts, the door of opportunity must not be shut against the negro.
Within a few weeks of his inauguration he precipitated a severe
discussion upon the status of the negro by entertaining Booker T.
Washington at the White House. He disciplined Republican leaders in the
South who endeavored to exclude negroes from the party organization and
to build up a "lily-white" Republican machine.

The administrative duties of the United States expanded rapidly after
the Spanish War. The extension of scientific functions beginning in the
eighties continued until the volume of work forced the creation of new
offices. Federal civil employees numbered 107,000 in 1880, 166,000 in
1890, 256,000 in 1900, and 384,000 in 1910. Among the newer scientific
activities was included that of the reclamation of the arid or semi-arid
lands of the Southwest.

The region between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada had been
regarded as uninhabitable since the days of Pike. Known as the "American
Desert," it figured in the atlases as a place of sand and aridity, and
became the