Take the three great Oriental peoples! With China, Great Britain is in
friendly agreement. With Japan, Great Britain is in closest
international pact. To India, Great Britain is a Mother. Yet Canada
refuses free admission to peoples from all three countries. Why? For
the same reason as do South Africa and Australia. It is only
secondarily a question of labor. The thing goes deeper than that.

Consider Japan first: Panama is turning every port facing west into a
front door instead of a back door. Within twenty years, the combined
populations of American ports on the Pacific have jumped from a few
hundreds of thousands at San Francisco and nothing elsewhere to almost
two million, with growth continuing at an accelerated rate promising
within another quarter of a century as many great harbors of almost as
great population on the Pacific as on the Atlantic. The Orient has
suddenly awakened. It is importing something besides missionaries. It
is buying American and Canadian steel, American and Canadian wool,
American and Canadian wheat, American and Canadian machinery, American
and Canadian dressed lumber. Ship owners on the Pacific report that
the docks of through traffic are literally jammed with goods outward
bound--"more goods than we have ships," as the president of one line
testified.

When the reason for building Panama has been shorn of highfalutin
metaphors, it concentrates down to the simple bald fact that the United
States possessions on the Pacific had grown too valuable to be guarded
by a navy ten thousand miles away around the Horn. True, Roosevelt
sent the fleet around the world to show what it could do, and the
country howled its jubilation over the fact. But the Little Brown
Brother only smiled; for the fleet hadn't coal to steam five hundred