same mother; the inheritors of Greece
and Rome, and of the Teutonic conquerors of the latter. A limited
express or a flying freight may carry a few passengers or a small bulk
overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific more rapidly than modern
steamers can cross the former ocean, but for the vast amounts in
numbers or in quantity which are required for the full fruition of
communication, it is the land that divides, and not the sea. On the
Pacific coast, severed from their brethren by desert and mountain
range, are found the outposts, the exposed pioneers of European
civilization, whom it is one of the first duties of the European
family to bind more closely to the main body, and to protect, by due
foresight over the approaches to them on either side.

It is in this political fact, and not in the weighing of merely
commercial advantages, that is to be found the great significance of
the future canal across the Central American isthmus, as well as the
importance of the Caribbean Sea; for the latter is inseparably
intwined with all international consideration of the isthmus problem.
Wherever situated, whether at Panama or at Nicaragua, the fundamental
meaning of the canal will be that it advances by thousands of miles
the frontiers of European civilization in general, and of the United
States in particular; that it knits together the whole system of
American states enjoying that civilization as in no other way they can
be bound. In the Caribbean Archipelago--the very domain of sea power,
if ever region could be called so--are the natural home and centre of
those influences by which such a maritime highway as a canal must be
controlled, even as the control of the Suez Canal rests in the
Mediterranean. Hawaii, too, is an outpost of the canal, as surely as
Aden or Malta is of Suez; or as Malta was of India in the days long
before the canal, when Nelson proclaimed that in that point of view
chiefly was it important to Great Britain. In the cluster of island
fortresses of the Caribbean is one of the greatest of the nerve
centres of the whole body of European civilization; and it is to be
regretted that so serious a portion of them now is in hands which not
only never have given, but to all appearances never can give, the
development which is required by the general interest.

For what awaits us in the future, in common with the states of Europe,
is not a mere question of advantage or disadvantage--of more or less.
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