This provision is reaffirmed in Article XVIII. of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty. There is no doubt that the British government regarded this promise of equal treatment as some compensation for the surrender of those rights of joint construction and control which Great Britain enjoyed under the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. In fact, Mr. Hay, in a memorandum he sent to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, described the treaty as a sort of contract between Great Britain and the United States by which the former gave up those rights just mentioned in return for the "rules and principles" included in the new treaty, the chief among these being, of course, the provision about equality of treatment for all nations. It was, therefore, a surprise when the United States government decided that the expression "all nations" did not include the United States themselves, and that it was quite open to them to give preferential treatment to their "coastwise" traffic. Under the term "coastwise" the United States include the sea-traffic not only between ports along a continuous coast, but between such points as San Francisco or Washington and the Philippine Islands. As a matter of fact, an amendment proposed by Mr. Burd in the Senate, reserving to the United States the right of favouring its "coastwise" traffic, had been defeated, when the new treaty was under discussion. But, leaving these controversial questions, the most important thing for us to notice is that the Panama Canal has what is known as an "international status." It is not quite the sole and absolute property of the United States in the sense in which the Kiel Canal belongs to Germany, the Corinth Canal to Greece, and the Amsterdam or North Sea Canal to the Netherlands. Its status is governed by treaties which impose certain obligations and restrictions upon the United States and lay down certain rules of administration. It was intended at first to make the status of the Panama and the Suez Canal identical. But there are considerable differences. The "neutrality" of the Suez Canal is guaranteed by all the Powers of Europe, that of the Panama Canal by two only, England and the United States, and it is safeguarded and maintained by the United States alone. Then the Suez Canal is and must remain unfortified, while the Panama Canal will be strongly fortified by the United States. The reader may wonder what precisely is meant by the word "neutral" as applied to the new waterway. The position will be as nearly as possible that indicated by Dr. Vaughan Cornish in the following passage:--