This was a naval war, and the United States were to feel the inconvenience and danger of having no sea communication between their eastern and western coasts except _via_ the far southern extremity of the continent. United fleet action over the whole theatre of the war was rendered impossible. An event soon occurred which finally completed the conviction of the American people that, in the words of President Grant, "an American canal on American soil" was a national necessity. At the beginning of the war the battleship _Oregon_, one of the finest ships in the United States navy, lay off San Francisco. She was not wanted there, but she was very badly wanted at the West Indies, the main scene of the naval struggle. To get there the _Oregon_ had to sail 13,400 miles round Cape Horn instead of 4,600 miles _via_ a Panama canal, if there had been one. Everybody in the United States knew that the precious warship was making that perilous journey exposed all the way to the attack of the enemy. If she had been lost, the course of the war might have been very different, and even the delay of this long passage was a serious consideration at so critical a time. However, the vessel arrived safely and in a record time off Florida, and the suspense and anxiety of the American people were changed into jubilation. But "never again" was the moral they drew from this painful and exciting experience. At the end of the war a fresh canal campaign broke out in Congress, the claims of Nicaragua and Panama being urged by their respective champions. The outcome of this rivalry was the appointment of a commission, the third of the kind, to go to the isthmus and investigate both Nicaragua and Panama. We shall have something to say about the report of this commission, which was issued in December 1900. But already, before that appeared, negotiations had been set on foot between the United States and Great Britain with regard to the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. Allusions to the subject by Mr. M'Kinley in his second message to Congress had brought the question prominently before the people of both countries. The president had spoken thus:-- That the construction of such a maritime highway is now more than ever indispensable to that intimate and ready communication between our eastern and western seaboards demanded by the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and the prospective expansion of our influence and commerce in the Pacific, and that our national policy now more imperatively than ever calls for its control by this government, are propositions which I doubt not the Congress will duly appreciate and wisely act upon.