An instinct of friendliness between Great Britain and the United States, though expressed in no formal bonds, is yet a great force in the Pacific. There has been at least one occasion on which an American force in the Pacific has gone to the help of a British naval force engaging an Asiatic enemy. There are various more or less authentic stories showing the instinct of the armed forces of both nations to fraternise. Sometimes it is the American, sometimes the British sailor who is accused of breaking international law in his bias for the men of his own speech and race. It would not be wise to record incidents, which were irregular if they ever happened, and which, therefore, had best be forgotten. But the fact of the American man-of-war's-men in Apia Harbour, Samoa, finding time during their own rush to destruction at the hands of a hurricane to cheer a British warship steaming out to safety, is authentic, and can be cited without any harm as one instance of the instinctive friendship of the two peoples in the Pacific of common blood and common language. FOOTNOTES: [8] This proposal has now (1912) been revived in the face of the disquieting uprise of Chinese power. It is an indication of the stubborn resolve of the White populations to prohibit Asiatic immigration. CHAPTER XV THE PANAMA CANAL The poetry that is latent in modern science, still awaiting its singer, shows in the story of the Panama Canal. Nature fought the great French engineer, de Lesseps, on that narrow peninsula, and conquered him. His project for uniting the waterways of the Pacific and the Atlantic was defeated. But not by hills or distances. Nature's chief means of resistance to science was the mobilising of her armies of subtle poisoners. The microbes of malaria, yellow fever, of other diseases of the tropical marshes, fell upon the canal workers. The mortality was frightful. Coolie workers, according to one calculation, had a year's probability of life when they took to work on the canal. The superintendents and engineers of the White Race went to their tasks as soldiers go to a forlorn hope. Finally the forces of disease conquered. The French project for cutting a canal through the isthmus of Panama was abandoned, having ruined the majority of those who had subscribed to its funds, having killed the majority of those who had given to it of their labour.