atan Channel, somewhat broader, leads into the
Caribbean Sea. It may be mentioned here, as an important military
consideration, that from the mouth of the Mississippi westward to Cape
Catoche--the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula--there is no harbor that can
be considered at all satisfactory for ships of war of the larger
classes. The existence of many such harbors in other parts of the
regions now under consideration practically eliminates this long
stretch of coast, regarded as a factor of military importance in the
problem before us.

In each of these sheets of water, the Gulf of Mexico and the
Caribbean, there is one position of pre-eminent commercial importance.
In the Gulf the mouth of the Mississippi is the point where meet all
the exports and imports, by water, of the Mississippi Valley. However
diverse the directions from which they come, or the destinations to
which they proceed, all come together here as at a great crossroads,
or as the highways of an empire converge on the metropolis. Whatever
value the Mississippi and the myriad miles of its subsidiary
water-courses represent to the United States, as a facile means of
communication from the remote interior to the ocean highways of the
world, all centres here at the mouth of the river. The existence of
the smaller though important cities of the Gulf coast--Mobile,
Galveston, or the Mexican ports--does not diminish, but rather
emphasizes by contrast, the importance of the Mississippi entrance.
They all share its fortunes, in that all alike communicate with the
outside world through the Strait of Florida or the Yucatan Channel.

In the Caribbean, likewise, the existence of numerous important ports,
and a busy traffic in tropical produce grown within the region itself,
do but make more striking the predominance in interest of that one
position known comprehensively, but up to the present somewhat
indeterminately, as the Isthmus. Here again the element of decisive
value is the crossing of the roads, the meeting of the ways, which,
whether imposed by nature itself, as in the cases before us, or
induced, as sometimes happens, in a less degree, by simple human
dispositions, are prime factors in mercantile or strategic
consequence. For these reasons the Isthmus, even under the
disadvantages of land carriage and transshipment of goods, has ever
been an important link in the communications from East to West, from
the days of the first discoverers and throughout all subs