The Canal Zone by B. E. Connerly

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 25, 1911

The Canal Zone

By B. E. Connerly

WHILE current journalism is giving so much space to glowing accounts of progress made in building the great canal, and while all the world is interested in the developments on the Isthmus of Panama, no doubt the readers of the REVIEW will be glad to know something of the progress of the advent message here, from those who have been chosen to represent it to the multitudes who are advancing what is perhaps the greatest industrial achievement of all times.

Our little country, with an area of only ten by forty-seven miles, and with less than a decade of national life, is famous only because that through it there is being built the largest interoceanic ship canal in the world, at a cost of from thirty-five to forty-five million dollars annually.

The population is exceedingly cosmopolitan; but from whatever part of the world the people come, it is with the one object of getting rich, and there is none that seeketh after God. Including the two terminal points, Colon and Panama City, the Canal Zone has, approximately, one hundred thousand inhabitants, divided about as follows: Natives, 35,000 (these speak the Spanish, and are about equally divided between black and white); West Indians, 40,000; Americans, 10,000; Spaniards and Italians, 5,000; Chinese, 5,000; and other foreigners, such as French, Greeks, and East Indians, 5,000.

Our work among these people is onward, and though the evangelical branch is conducted for the most part in English, we are, by means of our literature, doing something for the others in this great Babylon of tongues. There are two organized churches and five companies in the Canal Zone, and work is being done in the seventeen towns along the line of the canal. Elder H. C. Goodrich, president of the conference, devotes less than half his time to the Canal Zone. In the conference with him are engaged one minister and six canvassers. We are making an effort this year to extend our work among the two hundred fifty thousand people scattered over the four hundred seventy miles of the singularly shaped republic of Panama. Among these are several thousand Indians, for whom we must plan to work.

It is believed that the canal will be completed in 1915; and when we take into account the fact that there are from forty to forty-five thousand men employed in operating the best and most effective machinery it is possible for the inventive genius of man to produce, and when we see the hundreds of long trains of soil winding out of the ever-deepening cuts, it is easy to believe that the great work will be completed on time.

It behooves us to work while it is called to-day. We hope that by the time the message is faithfully given to our little field, the other workers will have finished in the fields to which the Lord has called them, that all may go home together.

B. E. CONNERLY.