Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/168

148 the facts, flatly denied by President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Johy Hay; and the most rigid investigations by Congress have failed to reveal the slightest evidence either of the existence of such a conspiracy, or of the need of any external incentive for the Isthmus to revolt.

The same orders were given the commanders of our war-ships as in several previous revolutions: to allow neither belligerent to land men or arms within fifty miles of either Panama or Colon. Colombia talked much of marching an army overland to the Isthmus, but that trail runs through the land of the San Blas Indians, and it would take a very strong army of white men to fight their way through that region, either then or to-day. Certain San Blas chiefs who had been made colonels in the Colombian army refused to fight the Panamanians; and the country of these Indians, though nominally in one or the other of the two republics, has been really an independent buffer state between them ever since 1903.

The Republic of Panama was quickly organized, with a constitution modeled on that of the United States, and a treaty was made between the two countries, by which the United States received the perpetual right to build and maintain a canal across the Isthmus, in return for the payment of $10,000,000. It also acquired possession of the Canal Zone, a strip of land five miles wide on either side of the Canal, and this bit of Central America is now as much United States territory as the parade ground at West Point. The two cities of Panama and Colon, however, were scalloped out of either end of the Zone and left part of the republic; but their ports, Balboa