"AT AN EPOCH WHICH WE MAY CALL NEAR, SINCE IT CONCERNS DE TOCQUEVILLE. UVA. NOV 1 5 1993 LAW LIBRARY NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, 182 FIFTH AVENUE. 1880. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION. THE appearance upon the Isthmus of Darien, at the outset of the year 1880, of M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the renowned French engineer and diplomatist, to whom the nineteenth century owes the inception and completion of the Suez Canal, has startled the thinking people of this country into a sudden but most desirable state of anxiety as to the effects likely to be produced upon the interests, the prestige, and the prosperity of the United States by the opening, under other auspices than ours, of a great waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Though the question of opening such a waterway has occupied the minds of American statesmen and of American engineers at intervals, ever since the foundation of the republic, and though it has of late years acquired an unprecedented gravity and importance for the American |