a Central American canal, British statesmen,
finding their last attempt to control the most feasible route (by
Nicaragua) abortive, accomplished the next best object in the interest
of British trade. They cast the onus of building the canal on the
people who would reap the greatest advantage from it, and who were
bound to keep every one else out, but were at the same time very
unlikely to undertake such a gigantic enterprise outside their own
undeveloped territories for many a long year; while at the same time
they skilfully handicapped that country in favor of British sea power
by entering into a joint guarantee to respect its neutrality when
built. This secured postponement of construction indefinitely, and yet
forfeited no substantial advantage necessary to establish effective
naval control in the interests of British carrying trade."

Whether this passage truly represents the deliberate purpose of
successive British governments may be doubtful, but it is an accurate
enough estimate of the substantial result, as long as our policy
continues to be to talk loud and to do nothing,--to keep others out,
while refusing ourselves to go in. We neutralize effectually enough,
doubtless; for we neutralize ourselves while leaving other powers to
act efficiently whenever it becomes worth while.

In a state like our own, national policy means public conviction, else
it is but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. But public
conviction is a very different thing from popular impression,
differing by all that separates a rational process, resulting in manly
resolve, from a weakly sentiment that finds occasional hysterical
utterance. The Monroe Doctrine, as popularly apprehended and indorsed,
is a rather nebulous generality, which has condensed about the Isthmus
into a faint point of more defined luminosity. To those who will
regard, it is the harbinger of the day, incompletely seen in the
vision of the great discoverer, when the East and the West shall be
brought into closer communion by the realization of the strait that
baffled his eager search. But, with the strait, time has introduced a
factor of which he could not dream,--a great nation midway between the
West he knew and the East he sought, spanning the continent he
unwittingly found, itself both East and West in one. To such a state,
which in itself sums up the two conditions of Columbus's problem; to
which the control of the strait is a necessity, if not of existence,
at