It does not seem necessary to my present purpose to enter into detailed
consideration of the many immediate and prospective advantages which
will flow from this convention to our productions and our shipping
interests.

CHESTER A. ARTHUR.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, _Washington, December 10, 1884_.

_To the Senate of the United States:_

I transmit herewith to the Senate, for consideration with a view to
ratification, a treaty signed on the 1st of December with the Republic
of Nicaragua, providing for the construction of an interoceanic canal
across the territory of that State.

The negotiation of this treaty was entered upon under a conviction that
it was imperatively demanded by the present and future political and
material interests of the United States.

The establishment of water communication between the Atlantic and
Pacific coasts of the Union is a necessity, the accomplishment of which,
however, within the territory of the United States is a physical
impossibility. While the enterprise of our citizens has responded to the
duty of creating means of speedy transit by rail between the two oceans,
these great achievements are inadequate to supply a most important
requisite of national union and prosperity.

For all maritime purposes the States upon the Pacific are more distant
from those upon the Atlantic than if separated by either ocean alone.
Europe and Africa are nearer to New York, and Asia nearer to California,
than are these two great States to each other by sea. Weeks of steam
voyage or months under sail are consumed in the passage around the Horn,
with the disadvantage of traversing tempestuous waters or risking the
navigation of the Straits of Magellan.

A nation like ours can not rest satisfied with such a separation of its
mutually dependent members. We possess an ocean border of considerably
over 10,000 miles on the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and, including
Alaska, of some 10,000 miles on the Pacific. Within a generation the
western coast has developed into an empire, with a large and rapidly
growing population, with vast, but partially developed, resources.
At the present rate of increase the end of the century will see us a
commonwealth of perhaps nearly 100,000,000 inhabitants, of which the
West should have a considerably larger and richer proportion than now.
Forming one nation in interests and aims, the East and the West are more
widely disjoined for all purposes of direct and economical i