Prior to the completion of the Panama Canal the American Seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, for many years had been silent waters. The Panama Canal has reversed these conditions. The important trade routes of the world will pass about these islands and over these seas, and they will be noisy with the whirl of the propeller and bright with the sail of ships. A great part of American commerce and a larger part of the traffic of the world will be through the American seas between the walls of this canal and by the shores of Haiti. These seas will become more popular with commerce than any other section of the world. They will be a gathering place and crossing point for the east and the west, and their possession, either forcibly or otherwise, will carry with it more potentiality than the possession of any other body of water on the face of the earth. It will be absolutely necessary, says this country, so to speak, that the outposts of the canal shall be in the hands of strong and stable governments, and it cannot be thought that the harbors necessary for that commerce and the islands by which it will pass, and in whose broad bays it will be compelled to anchor, shall be ripe with revolution and dangerous to that commerce. This country which is practically guardian of this commerce must allow to obtain no condition which will be a daily menace to this unusual trade. In all of these communities the commercial diplomacy of our time will have a growing interest, an interest greatly enhanced by the fact that through the Caribbean, the traffic center of the American tropics, will pass the trade routes developed by the Panama Canal. Both the competition for the control of the trade which lies within their borders, and the fact that before their ports passes the commerce of distant countries, will give to Caribbean communities an importance in international affairs they have not had since the days when the Spanish Empire in America was at its height and the people of one of the great world powers depended for its prosperity on the arrival of the gold ships from its American colonies. The fortunes of the Caribbean are no matter of merely local interest. They involve, to a degree still unappreciated, the world at large and especially the American continents, both North and South. Upon the solution of the problems which arise there may depend the character of international and economic development in America. The importance of the new position in which the Caribbean region stands is brought home by almost every development in American international affairs.