Page 115 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

g6 The Isthmus and Sea Power* ;

resolve, from a weakly sentiment that finds
occasional hysterical utterance. The Monroe
Doctrine, as popularly apprehended and in-
dorsed, is a rather nebulous generality, which
has condensed about the Isthmus into a faint
point of more defined luminosity. To those
who will regard, it is the harbinger of the
day, incompletely seen in the vision of the
great discoverer, when the East and the West
shall be brought into closer communion by the
realization of the strait that baffled his eager
search. But, with the strait, time has intro-
duced a factor of which he could not dream,
— a great nation midway between the West
he knew and the East he sougnt, spanning
the continent he unwittingly found, itself both
East and West in one. To such a state,
which in itself sums up the two conditions of
Columbus's problem ; to which the control
of the strait is a necessity, if not of existence,
at least of its full development and of its
national security, who can deny the right to
predominate in influence over a region so vital
to it ? None can deny save its own people
and they do — not in words, perhaps, but
it,
in act. For let it not be forgotten that failure