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Page 49
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.
Issues of vital moment are involved. A present generation is trustee
for its successors, and may be faithless to its charge quite as truly
by inaction as by action, by omission as by commission. Failure to
improve opportunity, where just occasion arises, may entail upon
posterity problems and difficulties which, if overcome at all--it may
then be too late--will be so at the cost of blood and tears that
timely foresight might have spared. Such preventive measures, if
taken, are in no true sense offensive but defensive. Decadent
conditions, such as we observe in Turkey--and not in Turkey
alone--cannot be indefinitely prolonged by opportunist counsels or
timid procrastination. A time comes in human affairs, as in physical
ailments, when heroic measures must be used to save the life of a
patient or the welfare of a community; and if that time is allowed to
pass, as many now think that it was at the time of the Crimean war,
the last state is worse than the first,--an opinion which these
passing days of the hesitancy of the Concert and the anguish of
Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages, surely indorse. Europe,
advancing in distant regions, still allows to exist in her own side,
unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-blood; still leaves in
recognized dominion, over fair regions of great future import, a
system whose hopelessness of political and social improvement the
lapse of time renders continually more certain,--an evil augury for
the future, if a turning tide shall find it unchanged, an outpost of
barbarism ready for alien occupation.
It is essential to our own good, it is yet more essential as part of
our duty to the commonwealth of peoples to which we racially belong,
that we look with clear, dispassionate, but resolute eyes upon the
fact that civilizations on different planes of material prosperity and
progress, with different spiritual ideals, and with very different
political capacities, are fast closing together. It is a condition not
unprecedented in the history of the world. When it befell a great
united empire, enervated by long years of unwarlike habits among its
chief citizens, it entailed ruin, but ruin deferred through centuries,
thanks to the provision made beforehand by a great general and
statesman. The Saracenic and Turkish invasions, on the contrary, after
generations of advance, were first checked, and then rolled back; for
they fell upon peoples, disunited indeed by internal discords and
strife, like the nations of Europe to-day, but still nations of
warriors, ready by training and habit to strike for their rights, and,
if need were, to die for them. In the providence of God, along with
the immense increase of prosperity, of physical and mental luxury,
brought by this century, there has grown up also that counterpoise
stigmatized as "militarism," which has converted Europe into a great
camp of soldiers prepared for war. The ill-timed cry for disarmament,
heedless of the menacing possibilities of the future, breaks idly
against a great fact, which finds its sufficient justification in
present conditions, but which is, above all, an unconscious
preparation for something as yet noted but by few.
On the side of the land, these great armies, and the blind outward
impulse of the European peoples, are the assurance that generations
must elapse ere the barriers can be overcome behind which rests the
citadel of Christian civilization. On the side of the sea there is no
state charged with weightier responsibilities than the United States.
In the Caribbean, the sensitive resentment by our people of any
supposed fresh encroachment by another state of the European family
has been manifested too plainly and too recently to admit of dispute.
Such an attitude of itself demands of us to be ready to support it by
organized force, exactly as the mutual jealousy of states within the
European Continent imposes upon them the maintenance of their great
armies--destined, we believe, in the future, to fulfil a nobler
mission. Where we thus exclude others, we accept for ourselves the
responsibility for that which is due to the general family of our
civilization; and the Caribbean Sea, with its isthmus, is the nexus
where will meet the chords binding the East to the West, the Atlantic
to the Pacific.
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