EDITOR'S TABLE. 



843 



ucts of human industry constitute one 

 of the most powerful of all agencies of 

 social amelioration and the improve- 

 ment of the condition of mankind. 

 The discovery of America, the greatest 

 of all discoveries, may be said to have 

 •doubled the habitable world, and to 

 have opened a new destiny for man 

 upon earth ; yet it was but an incident 

 in the progress of commerce. The 

 blind passion for wealth was the im- 

 pulse that drove men to the exploration 

 of the unknown globe; and, as often 

 occurs in investigation, the search for 

 one thing led to another of far more 

 value and importance. To increase Ori- 

 ental trade by finding a new and shoi-ter 

 route to the Indies was the object of 

 Columbus ; he discovered a new land, 

 and died in the conviction that it was 

 Asiatic, and that he had brought " the 

 fabulous wealth of Ind " within the 

 immediate grasp of Eui'ope. 



Yet, seven years after the death of 

 Columbus, Balboa crossed the Isthmus 

 of Darien and discovered the Pacific 

 Ocean. So it was not India that had 

 been reached, but a new world that 

 had been found. The old problem, 

 therefore, still remained, how to get to 

 the Indies by a western route ; but the 

 question was now how to find a pas- 

 sage through. All navigators were 

 alert in quest of a strait that should 

 lead into the Indian Ocean, and the in- 

 centive that inspired the enterprise of 

 Columbus animated his successors dur- 

 ing half a century later. Prescott says 

 that the discovery of a new and shorter 

 route to the Indies " is the true key to 

 the maritime movements of the fif- 

 teenth and the first half of the six- 

 teenth centuries." 



But, failing to find " the secret of 

 the strait," men of enterprise began to 

 think of cutting the knot by opening 

 an artificial waterway for ships across 

 the American Isthmus. The Spaniards 

 led in this project of uniting the oppo- 

 site harbors by a canal ; and Galvao, in 

 1528, proposed to Charles V. to open a 

 ship communication between the oceans 



at PanaiTia. Plans and surveys were 

 afterward made for this purpose. In 

 1534 Charles V. gave instructions to 

 Cortez to seek such a route. In 1551 

 Gomara, author of the " History of the 

 Indies," proposed three routes, includ- 

 ing Nicaragua. In 1507 Antonelli was 

 sent by Philip II. to explore with ref- 

 erence to a ship-canal. In 1795 Wil- 

 liam Patterson, founder of the Bank of 

 England, and a man of comprehensive 

 views, who had possessed himself of an 

 extensive and minute knowledge re- 

 specting the institutions and commerce 

 of foreign countries, obtained the royal 

 sanction to a project for colonizing Da- 

 rien, one of the objects of the enter- 

 prise being to cut a canal through the 

 isthmus. The expedition was attempt- 

 ed, but proved a disastrous failure. 

 During the next hundred years various 

 projects were suggested, and explora- 

 tions made by citizens of difierent 

 countries with a view of overcoming 

 this barrier to navigation ; and in 1804 

 Humboldt gave a new interest and im- 

 pulse to the subject by publishing a 

 careful discussion of the relative merits 

 of several routes for an interoceanic 

 canal. As the commerce of the world 

 increased in the early part of this cen- 

 tury, the problem became still more 

 urgent, and projects for solving it mul- 

 tiplied — Spain, France, Holland, Eng- 

 land — all the leading maritime nations 

 contributing schemes and projectors 

 for the undertaking. 



TJjus, for three centuries and a half 

 the question of piercing the American 

 Isthmus has been universally recognized 

 as a world's question, as the common 

 interest of all nations, and as open to 

 anybody who had the ability and the 

 perseverance to accomplish it. For two 

 hundred years before our nation came 

 into existence tliis was the broad view 

 taken of the enter[)rise in all countries; 

 and, when the United States first be- 

 came interested in the subject, it was 

 also as a project concerning alike the 

 whole civilized world. 



So far as we learn, the first action 



