The completion of the Panama Canal may be set down as the date of the discovery of Latin-America by the people of the United States. Previous to that date the North Americans were aware enough of the Monroe Doctrine, but almost unaware of the lives and interests of the nations living south of the Rio Grande River. With the opening of the Canal the North Americans began thinking south, and so far as the process has gone it has been very informing. Once the war is out of the way, the process will be greatly accelerated. With uninterrupted commercial conditions, five years of the expanded life due to the Canal will be about equal to sending the whole people back to school for a year. The cultural and geographical values of this new zone of thinking have hardly been felt as yet, but now that the attention of the world is released from the battlefields of Europe and the enormous social and financial problems arising from the expense of making the world decent once for all, the tide of interest is again turning southward along the shores of our own great oceans to the mighty events that await us there. Spanish-America has twelve republics and eight thousand miles of coast line on the Pacific ocean. The United States has a Pacific Coast of about fifteen hundred miles. The eight thousand miles marks the western boundaries of lands enormously rich in things that the world needs, but exceedingly poor in finished products or adequate growth. Probably no country on earth shows a wider margin to-day between present raw resources and possible high developments than these same twelve Spanish-speaking countries. The only analogy that bears on the case is that of the rapid and extensive advancement of the Pacific States after the completion of the transcontinental railroads. There is reason to believe that a similar record of progress awaits the west coast of South America. The combined foreign trade of the west-coast republics before the war reached the very respectable total of nearly one billion of gold dollars in a single year. There are commercial prophets who believe that within ten years from the completion of demobilization this volume of trade may be doubled. This means new markets, new industries, new development of mines, markets, manufactures, and agriculture, new colonization projects and a score of other unpredictable results. No less an authority than Mr. John L. Barrett says, "I believe that the Panama Canal will initiate in all South American countries a genuine movement which will have a most important bearing on the commerce and civilization of the world." An immense amount of iron lies buried in the mountains of the west coast. Not much has ever been done about it. But enormous quantities of ore have been destroyed by the processes of war, and South American iron may come to high values sooner than its owners have supposed.