Panama, Today

Evening Round-Up
by William Crosbie Hunter

(Page 6 of 11)

Panama

The Man Who Found It and the Man Who Used It

Four hundred years ago Jim Balboa climbed a mountain peak on the Isthmus of Panama, and looked on the boundless Pacific and said: "I have this day discovered you, and henceforth the geographies will perpetuate this great event."

Little did Jim think that by 1914 ships of twenty thousand tons would sail through the impassable mountains.

Jim knew he had discovered something great, but little did he dream of the real greatness of the world's future. Little did he dream that the vast new continent on whose neck he stood was to hold the greatest nation of the twentieth century.

Gold, new territory for kings, new fields for the church - were the magnets which drew early navigators like Balboa to the land in the West across the Atlantic.

Those early adventurers little thought of exploiting their discoveries for the benefit of mankind.

It is a long time and a far cry from Capt. Balboa to Colonel Goethals, from the discoverer to the constructor, and it is our good fortune to see and enjoy a work beyond the wildest dreams of Columbus, Balboa, Cortez and the other wanderlust adventurers.

Not only that, but the Panama Canal, now opened to the world, was for years deemed a chimerical dream and an impossibility, by the world as well as by most Americans.

Every ditch digger, including the great De Lesseps, proved a failure, so to Yankee grit in the person of Goethals belongs the credit for the completed work which is now called the "Eighth Wonder of the World."

The Pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, are wonders, but we have a Yankee contractor who can duplicate them if anyone puts up the money for the job.

We do not build pyramids or hanging gardens because they serve no useful purpose.

The Panama Canal is a greater wonder and is a most practical benefit to mankind. It doubles our navy; it enables us to move supplies of every kind from one coast to the other quickly and less expensively.

It shortens the world's highway between the oceans and helps every human being.

Balboa's name will live in geographies as the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, but Goethals' name will be remembered as the man who made most use of that discovery for the benefit of mankind.

The shades of Balboa and De Lesseps likely stalk around Panama at midnight and rub their eyes in amazement.

Today

The One Time in Our Keeping

As I walk on the old Santa Fe Trail each morning through Penn Valley Park in Kansas City, the marks of time are plainly visible.

Erosion of water and wind have bared the sedimentary rocks and exposed the layers in well defined pages so I may study this great rock-paged geology book, and indeed it's a pleasure to me.

Back of all is the grand plan of the Universe of which this earth is an atom. That plan is ruled by a Divine law and power.

For you or me to take a fragment of truth and attempt to pass it as a definite science, a complete religion or all truth, is an assumption which these records of countless ages frown upon as a hopeless, bootless task.

All science has some truth; all creeds, sects, isms and cults likewise have truth, but no branch or group possesses all truth.

My fossil fish on the wall wiggled his tail thousands of years ago, very likely millions of years.

He lived and died in accordance with the plan of the Creator of the Universe and you are an atom and I am an atom in that Universe and governed by the power that gave life and crushed to death that fossil fish.

Verily we presume when we say, "we have all the truth; think as we do or you are lost."

The old world has not told its full story. The Universe of which this world is a part is still a deeper mystery.

We shall not know all truth until the great revealing time.

We cannot change the pages of the millions of years gone by. We can do very little to change the pages of the millions of years to come. What little we can do, we can only do TODAY.

Today is yours and mine; let's do the best we can with our possession in act and thought and word.

The sun goes down behind the sky-line on the West as it has done for millions of years. I lay aside my pen with a bigger view, a deeper appreciation of the Creator and a profounder faith in His wisdom and works than ever.

God made. God rules. God plans. And verily we are weaklings and foolish, who presume by selfish prayer to suggest to Him what He shall do.

Let us strive to be appreciative of Him and try to lift ourselves in sublime thought into the higher faith thought and realize that we are part of Him and His plan, and failure is impossible to us, if we keep up and on, doing good, speaking softly, dealing gently, showing kindness today and living in accordance with the big, broad, generous, charitable plan instead of the little, bigoted, narrow, selfish idea that we are sole possessors of truth and that the man who differs with us in belief is in error.

This chapter is about big things and in it is a big moral for all who are big enough to grasp it.

Published by Hunter Service Kansas City, Mo., USA
Copyright 1915 by WM. C. Hunter