Transcontinental lines across North America and Siberia are thus seen to have an importance, not merely because they save an enormous detour by ship, but because they are several parts of a circular route with no final termini, while routes like the proposed Cape to Cairo line are seen not only to be in competition with the sea on either hand, but to lead nowhere at the southern end. Cape Town as a land terminus is a dead end. Vancouver and San Francisco are on main through routes to lands beyond. It is these lands beyond, indeed, which in part supply the objectives for the routes radiating northwestward from Chicago and Winnipeg, while the possibility of the existence of these routes depends on the fact that the lands through which they pass are open enough for settle ment by men who would use them to gain control of energy in ways to which they have become accustomed.
Here, then, is the United States taking its place in the circle of lands, a new orbis terrarum ; and yet outside the system which has hitherto mattered, compact and coherent, with enormous stores of energy, facing Atlantic and Pacific, having relations with east and west of Euro-Asia, preparing by a fortified Panama Canal to fling her one fleet into either ocean, and attempting to secure the approaches to that Canal by the formulation of a Monroe doctrine which forbids control of any lands of the New World by Powers of the Old, but is effective at present only in those small and compara tively unimportant states lying round the seas through which vessels using the Panama Canal would pass.
Here, unlike the disunited states of Europe, in which men speak many languages and remember that through the long past years they have been at enmity, we have a vast land where people speak one language, with no long history of discord behind them—the United States.
But the lowlands of the South are damp and warm ; they have conditions different from those to which Europeans are accustomed, and in the early days of settlement negroes were brought by force from their African homes to carry on the harder manual labour of the fields, and especially to raise cotton for the Lanca shire factories. The negroes are increasing quickly in number; they form a compact community, ten millions strong, unabsorbed and impossible to absorb. The absence of the desert is still of importance. There is no Sahara to keep white and black apart. Such a problem has not hitherto presented itself to any nation, and the solution is not yet found.