The idea of wedding the Atlantic and the Pacific must have been original with the first observant and intelligent person viewing the two oceans from the hills of the Central-American isthmus. Presumably he was a Spanish adventurer, and the time practically four hundred years ago. A century before the landing on American soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, explorers were informing Charles V of Spain of the opportunity supplied by nature to connect the waters of the two oceans. In 1550, one Galvao, a Portuguese navigator, wrote a book to prove the feasibility of an artificial connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific; and in 1780 a scientific commission from Spain studied the three Central-American routes--Panama, San Blas, and Nicaragua. These are simple facts to be pondered over by busy people who may possibly be in doubt as to whether the "father" of the isthmian enterprise was De Lesseps, Theodore Roosevelt, or Admiral Walker.
But it required a knowledge of practical geography to learn that from Colon to Panama by sea is eight thousand miles, instead of forty-seven across country--and it took a dauntless American President to demand that his government construct a national water route across the isthmus at Panama, and to point the way to that end; and this was done against potent opposition to any canal, and expressed preference of powerful statesmen for the unfeasible Nicaraguan project.
It may be profitable for enthusiasts jumping at the conclusion that the American canal will pay from its opening, to study the returns of the Suez enterprise, the first full year of whose operation (1870) showed gross takings of only $1,031,365 from tolls levied upon 486 vessels. Speaking generally, a shipper sends his cargo by way of Suez only when 3,000 miles at least of ocean steaming may be saved--this is the approximate economy effected by the great turnstile between West and East, counting time, fuel, wages and other expenses. It may be accepted as a concrete fact that the employment of any canal by commerce must ever depend upon economic considerations.
Already acknowledging our commercial predominance, Europeans are not blind to the real purpose of the Panama Canal. But it should be borne in mind that whenever it is an open choice between the canal toll and the equivalent of time at sea, the Briton will be slow to decide in favor of contributing to the resources of a nation rising in brief time to commercial premiership; and Frenchmen, economists by nature, will take a similar view, as will Germans, and shippers of other nations. Expressed in the fewest words, the employment of the Panama route will be governed exclusively by self-interest, computed from the standpoint of material economy; sentimentality will bring not one ship to Uncle Sam as a patron--unless it be an American ship.