Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/695

 Johnson : The Panama Canal 685 with Spanish America. When the patient student does consider the Canal, he will be like Mr. Johnson, in contact with a big field, tempting the writer to run far afield into the widely separated corners where lie the problems and the records of diplomacy, politics, international law. engineering, sanitation, and the geographic influences which have here held the affairs of man in a savage, ruthless, molding grip. From all this activity, the one-volume writer must indeed choose, and it may be that Mr. Johnson has not wandered unnecessarily; but a perusal of the book calls to mind the fact that the journalist's field includes all that is interesting. That which was in its recent day good news or good " filler " for a metropolitan daily has gone into that part of the book dealing with the Panama Canal since the American govern- ment took active hold of the project. The other one-third of the book is a summary, an introduction, and in the choice of material one some- times wonders ; for example, why there should have been included a reproduction of a map of the world as conceived by Ptolemy. The in- teresting and spectacular thirty years' work of the French companies is dismissed with a brief thirty pages, including a chapter of analysis to show why they failed rather than what they did. The French period was followed by nearly a decade of American investigation and legisla- tion. We sent commission after commission and had report after re- port, a large amount of congressional action, national ferment, and dickering with the French company, and the final purchase of the French possessions by the United States government. This period the author covers in twenty-two pages, j^pparently he was not journalistically connected at this time. The author begins to expand the subject with the events of 1902. Here we see more traces of journalistic origin, for this is the time when Colombia began to lay plans for the capture of the canal millions, and thereby made what the newspapers called news and printed as such at great length. These iniquities are pointed out and the negotiations described in full. Then follows a full account of the Panama Revo- lution and of later Isthmian politics. The book might almost be called " The Politics and Administration of the Panama Canal since 1902." for the Colombian and Panama incidents are followed by an account of Taft's pacifying mission (of which party Mr. Johnson was a member) and of the turmoil at Washington over the details of ad- ministration and the problems of construction. Evidently the author's turn of mind is more for politics than for engineering. There is a surprising paucity of engineering matter, and it is certainly to be hoped that the various political events upon which he poses as an authority are more correctly conceived in his mind than is the physical appearance of the Canal itself. He actually prints a full-page map of Panama and the Canal in which the canal is laid down according to old plans which were abandoned several years ago and therefore have no relation whatever to the canal which the