By the time the canal is opened, the United States will have 100,000,000 inhabitants; and agriculture, assisted by ordinary methods and by irrigation, will have developed to an extent making our commodities dictators of supply and price. By that time, sea transportation cannot be regarded as a competitor of transcontinental railway systems that have done much toward making the country what it is: water transportation will be found a necessary adjunct to rail facilities, relieving the roads of a fraction of their through traffic.
To restore the Stars and Stripes to the seas will require years of earnest effort, much debating in the halls of Congress, a drastic liberalizing of marine laws, and much prodding of human energies by editorial writers.
Suez shareholders, when asked by Americans if they fear any rivalry from Panama, reply: "None at all; unless"--and here is the kernel of the matter--"your countrypeople find a way of creating a mercantile marine coincidently with the building of the canal."
With unlimited financial resources to promote the most gigantic of modern enterprises, with inexhaustible raw and cultivated products, with labor to produce any conceivable commodity, the humiliating fact confronted the people of the United States a few months since of seeing its official delegates to the Pan-American Congress at Rio de Janeiro set forth in a steamship flying the red flag of Great Britain.
The most remarkable accomplishment in the material history of the world is that the United States secured her commercial supremacy without possessing a merchant marine. It is one of the marvels of modern times, surely.
A modern man of business might believe that Bishop Heber of Calcutta wove into irresistible verse a tremendous advertisement for Ceylon real estate, but repelled investors by a sweeping castigation of mankind, when he wrote:
What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile.
In tens of thousands of Christian churches the praises of Ceylon are thus sung every Sunday, and will be as long as the inhabitants of America and Great Britain speak the English language. Some of the divine's statements, to be acceptable as impartial testimony, require modification; for the natural charms of the island are not so sweepingly perfect, and there man is far above the Asian average. Hymnists, it may be inferred, write with some of the license of poets. No part of England's great realm, nevertheless, is more beautiful than the crown colony of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean.