THE PROPOSED AMERICAN INTEROCEANIC CANAL 307 



Thus an enormous internal and transcontinental traffic has 

 sprung up. The total freight traffic of the Panama Railroad, 

 through and local, embracing freights to and from the entire 

 western coast of North America, Central America, and South 

 America, amounted during the year 1897 to only 290,651 tons, 

 whereas the tonnage carried across the continental divide by rail, 

 according to the best means of information, amounted to over 

 3,000,000 tons, and included freights of every class, from the 

 highest to the lowest. Besides, an enormous local traffic has 

 sprang up along the transcontinental lines and their branches. 

 A vast area has thus been reclaimed to the arts of civilization. 

 The seventy-ton steel locomotive and the eighty-pound steel rail 

 have become the chief instrumentalities of the grandest and most 

 efficient system of transportation ever seen on this globe, and the 

 demand for still larger achievements is imperative. The one- 

 hundred-ton steel locomotive has been built, the one-hundred- 

 pound steel rail has been laid, and the practicability of the one- 

 hundred-and ten-pound steel rail is affirmed. The determining 

 economic factor in the case is not railroad grades or mountain 

 summits or continental slopes, but coal, the price of coal. It is a 

 mere question of fuel, and nature has granted to our country 

 superabundant supplies of that invaluable source of power. The 

 result is that the quest of the early navigators for a natural water- 

 way through the western world and the vagaries of American 

 interoceanic canal propagandists have become or are fast becom- 

 ing things of the past — the mouldy past. 



The commerce of Colon at the eastern terminus of the Panama 

 Canal is very largely incidental to other and more important 

 traffic. Steamers embark from ports in Europe for ports in South 

 America, Central America, and the West India islands, touching 

 at Colon, as the}' do at other ports en route. The same is to a 

 considerable extent true as to the commerce of Panama at the 

 Pacific terminus of the Panama Railroad. In a word, neither 

 the Panama Canal nor the Nicaragua Canal is on the line of any 

 great independent commercial movement, but if completed would 

 occupy the position of lateral lines to comparatively small com- 

 mercial movements, the terminus of either canal being merely 

 points at which certain ocean steamer lines would touch and trade. 



In December, 1898, the American interoceanic canal question 

 assumed a new aspect. The " New Panama Canal Conipan}'," 

 a French enterprise (as was its predecessor, the Panama Canal 



