The completion of the Panama Canal is vastly more than the greatest engineering achievement of the human race or the opening of a new highway for the commerce of the world. As lugo said of Waterloo. "It is a change of front of the universe." It shrinks the earth into smaller compass and brings its races into closer contact. It will companion Atlantic lanes of travel with watery avenues of traffic across the illimitable expanses of the great South Sea. The goal of American and European rivalries will be the markets that lie upon Asiatic shores. And these will be held by their own peoples as best they can. Long ago they perceived that to do this their counter invasion of our markets was indispensable.