defensive act, if successfully managed, was turned to vital advantage by the enemy.

A desperate defense was unavailing. The city was captured, but found to be barren of treasure, as the Spanish had loaded a ship with their gold and silver before the attack began, and the ship could not be found. It was an unwise move, because the infuriated pirates proceeded to torture the people, and to murder hundreds, finally burning Panama to the ground. To-day tourists go out to see a tower and other ruins of the famous old city of Panama.

Panama was rebuilt on a short promontory in the Pacific, and although captured again by the pirates in 1680 has remained on the new site to this time. Many vicissitudes attended the career of the Spaniards for the following century and a half, the chief ruffle on their calm being an effort by William Paterson, a wealthy Englishman, to found a colony of Scotchmen in the Darien region on the Atlantic coast, east of Porto Bello. The first colony of 1,200 came in 1698 and perished from disease or fighting, and a second company of 1,300 followed the same course, being expelled or killed by the Spanish, so that not more than thirty ever returned to Scotland. It was a lamentable failure of English colonizing south of the American colonies, and was not followed by other experiments in Panama.

During all the stirring years in Panama the Spanish had swarmed over Mexico, Central America, and South America. Yet, early in the nineteenth century the great colonial empire began crumbling away.

Province after province revolted from Spain. The explanation is that the Spanish never looked on America as anything other than a place to extract gold and silver. This attitude enabled them to secure the most wealth in the shortest time, but the methods employed, and the treatment of the natives, laid the foundation in unstable elements. In North America regular agricultural and commercial pursuits caused English civilization to take deep root, but, in justice to Spain, it at least is true that she maintained her authority over her colonies as long as England did over hers.

Panama, in 1821, caught the spirit of revolt, and accomplished her freedom from Spain in a bloodless revolution. It then joined the Confederation of New Granada, the Colombia of to-day, under Simon Bolivar, South America's great soldier and statesman. Here ended the career of the Spanish in Panama.

Easily the most impressive fact in all the Western Hemisphere is the achievement of the Spanish in dispossessing a whole continent of its original tongues and substituting there for their own language. With the exception of some Portuguese colonies, the language of the Castiles is the language from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. The customs also are Spanish and so is the religion. The explanation of this truly remarkable fact is that the Spaniard absolutely refused to adapt himself to the native tongues, customs, or religion, forcing them to conform to his. But the chief credit for this achievement belongs to the missionaries of the Catholic Church, men no less

daring than the conquerors with whom they went hand in hand, planting missions and churches in the jungle. These indomitable priests taught the native children to speak Spanish, and in the course of centuries it became the continental language.

What will be the future of English in Latin America? It is not a wild prophecy to assert that in another generation Spanish will be decadent and English everywhere ascendent. Already the higher social and business circles are acquiring English. In every center of population it is making rapid headway, though it must be many years before the mass of the people make it their own. The South American youth is not dreaming of Europe, but of the giant young republic to the North. He wants to see its skyscrapers, its dazzling luxury in every phase of life. Its politics fascinates and amazes him. It seems a land literally rolling in wealth, the land of opportunity and the land where he may learn the arts with which to make a career in his own country. The Americans are as loath to adapt themselves to Spanish customs and dialects as the Spaniards were to the original. Every year Americans find it less difficult to get about anywhere in Latin America. English ultimately will triumph from Alaska to Magellan Straits, and the canal will speed the day.

CHAPTER IV

K

THE PANAMA RAILROAD

ENTUCKY'S great statesman, Henry Clay, as

Secretary of State in 1825 and as Senator in 1835, was interested farsightedly in plans for speedier communication at the Isthmus between the two oceans. The independence of Panama from Spain by a bloodless revolution in 1821 had placed the Isthmus in a new position for other European governments, or the United States, to negotiate terms for concessions. The American people were jealous of foreign activities, but not aggressively active themselves in concrete efforts toward a canal.

De Witt Clinton, prominently connected with the Erie Canal, headed a company that sought government aid in its plans for a canal in Central America, but though Clay encouraged the idea nothing definite resulted. The year following, or in 1826, Simon Boli-... var, South America's great soldier and statesman, invited the United States, among other American republics, to an international conference in Panama with the object of forming a union for the promotion and defense of all American interests.

While nothing significant came of this congress, it is noteworthy as the first attempt to form what is now the Pan-American Union, or the Bureau of American Republics, at Washington. It assembled on

June 22, 1826, but the United States representatives did not arrive in time to participate.

Panama had become a part of the confederation of New Granada after independence from Spain, and thenceforth lived the regular life of a turbulent province of what to-day is known as Colombia. All the commerce between the coasts drifted across the Isthmus at that point. Little effort had been made to improve the passage, so that swifter and easier communication was the dream of every seaman or traveler.

Clay introduced a resolution in the Senate in 1835 authorizing President Jackson to appoint a commissioner to investigate the feasibility of a rail or water route at the Isthmus. Charles Biddle undertook the mission and secured a concession at Bogota, the capital of New Grenada, but he died before making a report. President Van Buren interested himself in the project, but little came of American plans for the next ten years.

The ever alert French, in 1847, after securing a concession to build a railroad, allowed it to lapse. It is significant that this French failure was followed, as in the case of trying to dig a canal, by a successful attempt by the Americans.

Three Americans, William H. Aspinwall, John L/

Stephens and Henry Chauncey, of New York, taking advantage of the opening made by the French failure, obtained a concession from the Bogota government in 1849 for building a railroad across the Isthmus at Panama, with the important provision that no canal