It appears to the writer—­and to many others with whom he agrees, though without claim to represent them—­that the true state of the case is more nearly as follows:  Since our nation came into being, a century ago, with the exception of a brief agitation about the year 1850,—­due to special causes, which, though suggestive, were not adequate, and summarized as to results in the paralyzing Clayton-Bulwer Treaty,—­the importance of the Central American Isthmus has been merely potential and dormant.  But, while thus temporarily obscured, its intrinsic conditions of position and conformation bestow upon it a consequence in relation to the rest of the world which is inalienable, and therefore, to become operative, only awaits those changes in external conditions that must come in the fulness of time.  The indications of such changes are already sufficiently visible to challenge attention.  The rapid peopling of our territory entails at least two.  The growth of the Pacific States enhances the commercial and political importance of the Pacific Ocean to the world at large, and to ourselves in particular; while the productive energies of the country, and its advent to the three seas, impel it necessarily to seek outlet by them and access to the regions beyond.  Under such conditions, perhaps not yet come, but plainly coming, the consequence of an artificial waterway that shall enable the Atlantic coast to compete with Europe, on equal terms as to distance, for the markets of eastern Asia, and shall shorten by two-thirds the sea route from New York to San Francisco, and by one-half that to Valparaiso, is too evident for insistence.

In these conditions, not in European necessities, is to be found the assurance that the canal will be made.  Not to ourselves only, however, though to ourselves chiefly, will it be a matter of interest when completed.  Many causes will combine to retain in the line of the Suez Canal the commerce of Europe with the East; but to the American shores of the Pacific the Isthmian canal will afford a much shorter and easier access for a trade already of noteworthy proportions.  A weighty consideration also is involved in the effect upon British navigation of a war which should endanger its use of the Suez Canal.  The power of Great Britain to control the long route from Gibraltar to the Red Sea is seriously doubted by a large and thoughtful body of her statesmen and seamen, who favor dependence, in war, upon that by the Cape of Good Hope.  By Nicaragua, however, would be shorter than by the Cape to many parts of the East; and the Caribbean can be safeguarded against distant European states much more easily than the line through the Mediterranean, which passes close by their ports.