CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION. THE appearance upon the Isthmus of Darien, at the outset of the year 1880, of M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the renowned French engineer and diplomatist, to whom the nineteenth century owes the inception and completion of the Suez Canal, has startled the thinking people of this country into a sudden but most desirable state of anxiety as to the effects likely to be produced upon the interests, the prestige, and the prosperity of the United States by the opening, under other auspices than ours, of a great waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Though the question of opening such a waterway has occupied the minds of American statesmen and of American engineers at intervals, ever since the foundation of the republic, and though it has of late years acquired an unprecedented gravity and importance for the American people, through the establishment of our vast empire on the Pacific, and the immense development of our internal railway system between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, it has been so much obscured by exciting domestic issues, now happily coming to an end, that for Americans of the present generation it may be treated as a question almost absolutely new. It cannot be intelligently considered without quickening the enlightened patriotism of the American people, by making it more than ever apparent how vitally important it is to the prosperity of every State and every section of our beloved Union, that the primacy and predominance on this continent of the united republic should be jealously guarded against invasion from any quarter, no matter under what pretext or in what form attempted. In considering this question, as in considering all questions which arise out of or affect the relations between the United States and the powers of Europe, it must always be borne in mind that but little more than fifty years have elapsed since the United States took their place definitely in the system of Christendom as a power to be "counted with," to be considered, and to be respected. As we shall hereafter see, it was not until the ministers of the Holy Alliance, after the death at St. Helena of Napoleon I., had undertaken to consolidate throughout the world the system of government by divine right, that England, in her own interest quite as much as in the interests of liberty, called upon the government of the United States to proclaim the close on this continent of the period of European colonial experiments. The response of the American government to that call gave birth to what has ever since been known as the Monroe doctrine; and the unyielding assertion of that doctrine against every attempt to evade or to impair its force has ever since, with reason, been regarded by American statesmen of all shades of political opinion as essential to the position, the prestige, and the prosperity of the United States. It will be shown in the course of this treatise that any attempt to construct an inter-oceanic canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, under European auspices and with European capital, must inevitably lead to a very serious invasion of the position, to a very serious assault upon the prestige, and to very mischievous consequences to the prosperity of the United States. Had any one or more of the independent republics, called into existence by the disruption and destruction, during the first quarter of this century, of the vast American empire of Spain, acquired strength and stability enough to make the construction possible of an inter-oceanic canal through Spanish - American territory by Spanish |