By 1856 the guano industry in the Pacific had become of sufficient importance to warrant legislative administration and control. It was accordingly enacted that territory yielding guano, discovered by citizens of the United States and not in the possession of subjects of any other country, might, at the diseretion of the President, be considered as belonging to the United States. Further legislation guaranteed rights of inheritance, established the price of guano, extended the laws of high seas over the islands, and finally authorized their protection by the use of naval and land forces. During the decade of the eighties the United States had appropriated and extended temporary control over no less than fifty guano islands.[1]
By about 1890, therefore, there had developed in the Pacific a new maritime area of international commercial activity destined to be the scene of an intense struggle for trade and colonial expansion in the coming era. This field was to hold in the closing years of the nineteenth century the same significance as had the North Atlantic a little more than a century earlier.
Six nations were to operate in this field: France which was pledged to avenge her defeat of the Franco-Prussian War; Italy which aspired to the rank of one of the great nations in Europe; Russia which had entered upon a new program of expansion in northern Asia and the Near East; Germany which had just inaugurated a new policy of commercial expansion and colonial conquest in the Near Hast, Asia, Africa
- ↑ Moore, op. cit., pp. 563–580.
