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Updated: April 30, 2025
It was a long and difficult struggle, not only before the Committee on Foreign Relations, but before the Committee on Interoceanic Canals, and resulted in the retirement of Senator Morgan as chairman of the last-mentioned committee a position he had held for many years and in the selection of Senator Hanna to succeed him.
All other nations are invited by the State of Nicaragua to enter into the same treaty stipulations with her; and the benefit to be derived by each from such an arrangement will be the protection of this great interoceanic communication against any power which might seek to obstruct it or to monopolize its advantages.
The subject of an interoceanic canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Isthmus of Darien is one in which commerce is greatly interested.
This great enterprise of building the interoceanic canal can not be held up to gratify the whims, or out of respect to the governmental impotence, or to the even more sinister and evil political peculiarities, of people who, though they dwell afar off, yet, against the wish of the actual dwellers on the Isthmus, assert an unreal supremacy over the territory.
This ended the long fight over the construction of the Panama Canal at least, so far as it in any way involved the jurisdiction of the Committee on Foreign Relations. With the ratification of the treaty, the subject was transferred to the Committee on Interoceanic canals, where, during every session, matters of more or less importance connected with the canal are considered.
So soon as the necessity was perceived of establishing interoceanic communications across the Isthmus a company was organized, under the authority of the State of Nicaragua, but composed for the most part of citizens of the United States, for the purpose of opening such a transit way by the river San Juan and Lake Nicaragua, which soon became an eligible and much used route in the transportation of our citizens and their property between the Atlantic and Pacific.
He changed the whole attitude of the Senate concerning the route for an interoceanic canal. We all generally favored the Nicaraguan route. Senator Hanna became convinced that the Panama route was best, and he soon carried everything before him to the end that the Panama route was selected. During the first McKinley campaign, Mark Hanna was probably the most caricatured man in public life.
This letter announces the critical situation in which Nicaragua was placed and charges upon the Court of St. James a "well-known design to establish colonies on the coast of Nicaragua and to render itself master of the interoceanic canal, for which so many facilities are presented by the isthmus in that State." No reply was made to this letter.
These suggestions may serve to emphasize what I have already said on the score of the necessity of a neutralization of any interoceanic transit; and this can only be accomplished by making the uses of the route open to all nations and subject to the ambitions and warlike necessities of none.
Under these circumstances and in view of overtures made to the Governments of Nicaragua and Costa Rica by other parties for a new canal concession predicated on the assumed approaching lapse of the contracts of the Maritime Canal Company with those States, I have not hesitated to express my conviction that considerations of expediency and international policy as between the several governments interested in the construction and control of an interoceanic canal by this route require the maintenance of the status quo until the Canal Commission shall have reported and the United States Congress shall have had the opportunity to pass finally upon the whole matter during the present session, without prejudice by reason of any change in the existing conditions.
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