intercourse between the various colonies themselves, and from them to
the outer world; while the capital and shipping employed in this
traffic were protected by a powerful navy, which, except on very rare
occasions, was fully competent to its work. Thus, while unable to
utilize and direct the resources of the countries, as she could have
done had they been her own property, she secured the fruitful use and
reaped the profit of such commercial transactions as were possible
under the inert and narrow rule of the Spaniards. The fact is
instructive, for the conditions to-day are substantially the same as
those of a century ago. Possession still vests in states and races
which have not attained yet the faculty of developing by themselves
the advantages conferred by nature; and control will abide still with
those whose ships, whose capital, whose traders support the industrial
system of the region, provided these are backed by a naval force
adequate to the demands of the military situation, rightly understood.
To any foreign state, control at the Central American Isthmus means
naval control, naval predominance, to which tenure of the land is at
best but a convenient incident.

Such, in brief, was the general tendency of events until the time when
the Spanish colonial empire began to break up, in 1808-10, and the
industrial system of the West India islands to succumb under the
approaching abolition of slavery. The concurrence of these two
decisive incidents, and the confusion which ensued in the political
and economical conditions, rapidly reduced the Isthmus and its
approaches to an insignificance from which the islands have not yet
recovered. The Isthmus is partially restored. Its importance, however,
depends upon causes more permanent, in the natural order of things,
than does that of the islands, which, under existing circumstances,
and under any circumstances that can be foreseen as yet, derive their