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CHAPTER VII

THE ROOSEVELT IMPETUS

HEODORE ROOSEVELT, upon assuming

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the office of President, promised to carry out the policies of President McKinley, and, so far as the canal policy is concerned, he succeeded so eminently that a deliberate judgment, formed from a perspective view of the whole undertaking, warrants the assertion that his energy, decision, and sound judgment made an interoceanic canal possible in this generation.

The moment his dynamic personality got behind the idea it received an impetus, and he bucked the line of obstacles that arose in the path of the project until he retired in 1909, when the enterprise was advanced beyond the possibility of failure.

It was to President Roosevelt that the Walker Commission reported in November, 1901. His first message to Congress urged immediate action, and, after a good deal of wrangling over the Hepburn act in favor of Nicaragua, the Spooner act was passed on June 28, 1902. The Nicaraguan route never has deserved the attention it received, for the natural drift of commerce and travel had gone unerringly for four centuries to Panama, like a flow seeking the course of least resistance. But the advocates of the Nicaraguan route created such opposition as to call forth from the President the exertion of the strongest

well as the Herran treaty that succeeded it, had a number of impossible provisions, viewed in the light of our canal experience. It authorized the French company to sell its property to the United States and authorized the United States to build, operate, and protect the canal, the concession to run for one hundred years, and be renewable at the discretion of the United States. A commission, jointly appointed by the United States and Colombia, was to govern the Canal Zone and supervise its sanitation, Colombia, however, remaining sovereign over the territory. One article bound the United States to a declaration that it had no ideas of territorial expansion in Central America; the United States was to build waterworks and sewers and pave streets in Panama and Colon; the United States guaranteed the sovereignty of Colombia and all its territory against all the world; Colombia retained the function of policing the Canal Zone, but in the event of its failure to do so, the United States could intervene until peace was restored, then withdraw. The canal was to be finished fourteen years after the adoption of the treaty with a possible extension of twelve years, everything to revert to Colombia if the canal was not begun within five years and completed within twenty-five years. Colombia renounced the $250,000 annually paid by the Panama Railroad, but was to receive $7,000,000 in cash. There were provisions granting the right to use any rivers and lands necessary for the canal, and admitting canal supplies free of duty, giving free

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