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The opening of the Panama Canal does not merely portend a new era in trade, or the end of the epoch of trial and struggle on the Isthmus. It has a finality such as have few of the great works of man. Nowhere on this globe are there left two continents to be severed; two oceans to be united. Canals are yet to be dug, arms of the sea brought together. We may yet see inland channels from Boston to Galveston, and from Chicago to New York navigable by large steamships. But the union of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea at Suez, and the Atlantic and Pacific at Panama stand as man’s crowning achievements in remodeling God’s world. As Ambassador James Bryce, speaking of the Panama Canal, put it, “It is the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature.”

RUINS OF OLD PANAMA

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The gray sun of a bitter February day was sinking in a swirling sea as the ship doggedly plowed its way southward along the New Jersey coast. One after another the beacons that guard that perilous strip of sand twinkled out, and one after another voyagers unused to ocean’s stormiest moods silently disappeared into secretive cabins. “It may be a stern and rockbound coast,” said one lady with poetic reminiscence, “but I wish I was on it!” For it must be set down as a melancholy truth that the voyage from New York to Colon is as a rule tempestuous.