Their commerce could go and enter through their own ports unimpeded, for happily in this crisis there was no danger threatening from across the Pacific. Therefore, though the surrender of Boston had shaken them, it had not terrified them. The great inland country clung to the belief that the army would do something. During the enemy’s slow movement through Connecticut in the advance toward New York, the people of the West remained inspired by that hope, as men in past ages, stricken dumb by a darkened Heaven and a smoking mountain, still clung to the belief that a kindly miracle would interpose to save them, though the earth of their market places was trembling under their feet. That spiritual self-defense with which men armor themselves against inevitable fates had not given way until the Administration announced the surrender of the City of New York and its two great forts, with the statement: “The President assumes full responsibility. After a careful examination of the situation in person, he issued orders, as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, that the army in the field should offer no opposition.” Then the West began to fear with a great fear that its Pacific coast was not safe, after all. It thought, appalled, that an enemy so formidable and successful, confronting opposition so futile, might succeed in breaking the defenses of the Panama Canal as easily as he had broken the defenses of the Atlantic. _Panama Canal Safe_ But the Panama Canal was being held. The United States fleet, having failed to prevent the hostile landing on the New England coast, had turned at once to defend the one vital spot that it could protect even against superior numbers. That was the Caribbean entrance to the Canal. It raced there under forced draught. It surprised and destroyed an inferior force of cruisers and battleships that the enemy had stationed there for blockade. Again it was mathematics. The foe, forced to assure himself against attack on his transports off the New England coast, had held all his powerful ships north of the American fleet. The weaker blockaders in the South, facing guns of superior range, ships of superior speed, and superior volume of gun-fire, went down to destruction without even the satisfaction of biting hard as they died. Now the country that had been sick with humiliation because its navy would not fight, thanked Heaven that the fleet had kept itself intact: that instead of going down in glorious disaster, it had worked out a scientific problem coolly. The big navy, intact to its smallest torpedo boat, was lying fully potent under the strong defenses of Limon Harbor. The guns of the fortifications protected the ships, and the ships protected the fortifications. Three thousand naval officers and sixty thousand sailors and marines, added to the land forces in the defenses, made a force of highly trained, completely efficient men.[149] _The Defenses Perfect_