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that degree it is fortunate; but the roots of its existence should lie in deeper ground than popularity. It is to be hoped that the completion of the canal may serve to broaden the national outlook, and that we may be able to look back to it in coming years as the period in which a reasoned national policy, founded on national aims, shall have had its birth in the country at large.

There would be no excuse for a failure of the Navy itself to have a "reason for the faith that is in us"; nor can that reproach be laid at the door of the Navy, which has for years had a definite, consistent policy as expressed by the responsible naval advisers of the Navy Department. Moreover, the effect of the canal upon that policy has been carefully kept in mind since the day the canal was started.

THE PANAMA CANAL

PART V

THE PANAMA CANAL IN INTERNATIONAL LAW

BY

HARRY S. KNAPP

CAPTAIN U. S. NAVY

THE PANAMA CANAL IN INTERNATIONAL LAW

The Hay-Pauncefote treaty,* negotiated in 1901 between the United States and Great Britain, is the basis of the international status of the Panama Canal. It superseded the Clayton-Bulwer treaty † of 1850 between the same nations. In another place the writer has made a study of the two treaties, and a summary of the conclusions reached will be given here, for it is important to have a knowledge of the antecedent history to appreciate the full bearings of the present treaty obligations of the United States with respect to the canal.

Long before 1850 the desirability and eventual necessity of a canal joining the Atlantic and the Pacific had been recognized, but no sentiment had developed in the United States for exclusive control by this nation. On the contrary, the utterances of representative men were quite in the opposite sense; i.e., toward a guarantee by all the great commercial nations that the canal should be free and open to all. Shortly before 1850 Great Britain, already having a foothold in Central America at Belize, assumed a pro

* Compilation of Treaties in Force, 1904, p. 609.

↑ Ibid.,
p. 380.

The Real Status of the Panama Canal as Regards Neutralization. U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PROCEEDINGS, Vol. 36, No. 1; Whole No. 133, March, 1910.

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