The crash came on December 13, 1888, when the company suspended payments and went into bankruptcy, and on February 4, 1889, was put into the hands of a receiver. The Congress had estimated the cost of the canal at $114,000,000. The company had promised to finish it for $120,000,000. At the end of 1888 the work was scarcely two-fifths done, while nearly $400,000,000 had been disposed of. This colossal sum was said, not altogether untruthfully, to have been one-third spent on the canal, one-third wasted, and onethird stolen. Here are the amounts of the various subscriptions:

This was an appalling showing. It opened the eyes of the world, even of France, to the monstrous futility of the enterprise as it had been conducted. There was no salvation for it in the patronage which the pinchbeck conspirator Boulanger, then in the height of his brief popularity, gave it, in proclaiming himself the protector and promoter of the enterprise, and subscribing for twenty-five of its bonds. The United States Government promptly took advantage of its opportunity to complete the discomfiture of the concern that had flouted and defied it. A few days after the company's suspension of payments, Senator Edmunds proposed a resolution expressing American disapproval of any connection of any European government with any canal across any American Isthmus, which, on January 7, 1889, was

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adopted by an all but unanimous vote. A few weeks later, in February, Congress adopted another resolution, protesting against French control of the Panama Canal, and appropriating $250,000 to be used by the President in the protection of American rights and interests on that Isthmus. On February 7, the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua, an American organisation, chiefly of New York capitalists, was incorporated by act of Congress.

The remaining history of the De Lesseps enterprise, partly pathetic, partly tragic, and wholly unsavoury and disgraceful, may be briefly dismissed. Humanity forbids us long to dwell upon such a theme. Judicial proceedings and Parliamentary investigations and trials were conducted at Paris in 1892-93, and there was disclosed to the horrified world such an orgy of corruption as history had never before recorded. A hundred Senators and Deputies were accused of having taken bribes. The Ministry and the Police department were under the same charge. Ten Senators and Deputies, including five former Ministers, were brought to trial, together with the Directors of the Company. Baron Jacques Reinach, the financial agent of the company, who had done much of the bribing, committed suicide. Arton, a banker, who had been associated with him in the dirty work, fled into exile, and long afterward, in 1905, also killed himself. Cornelius Herz, the third member of the triumvirate of corruption, went to England, and either fell or pretended to fall ill, so that he could not be extradited, and thus spent the rest of his life. Ferdinand de Lesseps collapsed, physically and mentally, and probably never fully realised what had happened or what afterward happened. On January 10, 1893, these sentences were pronounced: Ferdinand de Lesseps, five years' imprisonment and $600 fine, and his son, Charles de Lesseps, the same; Baron Cottu, and Marius Fontane, each two years' imprisonment and $600 fine; M. Eiffel, two years' imprisonment, and $4,000 fine. The sentence against the elder De Lesseps was never executed, and that against his son was annulled by the Court of Appeals. The

judgment of the world was that both Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps had been accused and condemned without cause, and that they were guiltless of the iniquities which had been perpetrated in their names. Ferdinand de Lesseps died on December 7, 1894, without ever rallying from his prostration, and his fame will be immortal despite the melancholy ending of his career.

In the United States it became clear that extravagant sums of money had been used in secret if not illicit measures to promote the interests of Panama and to hamper and defeat the rival enterprise at Nicaragua. It was proved that combinations for trade monopoly had been formed by the Panama railroad, then owned by the French canal company, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and certain transcontinental railroads; all of which strengthened the resolution to enforce the established principle of an American canal under American control. The De Lesseps scheme had been conceived and elaborated in defiance and denial of that principle, and in its hopeless collapse it left that principle triumphant above all danger of future challenge.

CHAPTER VII

WHY THE FRENCH FAILED

THERE is a familiar story of a lawyer who told a judge there were twelve good and sufficient reasons why his client had not obeyed a summons to appear in court. "In the first place," he began in recounting them, "he is dead." "Never mind the other eleven reasons," said the judge. Perhaps it will be risking a similar interruption for me to attempt to tell the reasons why the French under De Lesseps so signally and disastrously failed at Panama, after even the brief mention which I have already made of their financial wastefulness and corruption. Nevertheless, some of the reasons are so instructive that they deserve more than passing notice; some of them apply not only to the original De Lesseps Company but also to its successor, the New French Canal Company; and some of them were such as were not realised by the world at large at the time, but have only now become apparent to those who have visited the Isthmus and have studied the records and the situation there.

Let me begin with the matter of finances, since I have already referred to it. The extent of the profligacy of the De Lesseps régime was not bounded by the bribery of French officials, the subsidising of the French press, and the exercise of secret and sinister influences in the United States. "The trail of the serpent is over it all," on the Isthmus as well as at Paris, New York, and Washington. We were standing one day on the wind-swept veranda of Major Le Jeune's cottage at Empire, that sightly and salubrious hill where camp the United States troops which guarantee the order of the Canal Zone and also, indirectly, of the Republic of Panama. It was one of the highest points on the Isthmus

along the line of the canal, and as we could see almost from sea to sea we fell to likening it to that "peak in Darien" whereon stout Cortez-alias Balboa-stood and gazed on the Pacific; in the midst of which, reverting to the topic we had been discussing on our way thither, I asked a man who knew, "What was the real cause of the French failure, and how can we hope to succeed where De Lesseps failed?" For answer, he persisted in the lighter fancies of our vision, and pointing to the splendid vistas, toward the Pacific and toward the Caribbean, he said: "You see all that?" "Yes." "Forty-seven miles from miles from Colon to Panama?" "Yes." "Well, in De Lesseps's time, it was forty-seven miles of 'graft.'" "Yes; and what is it now?" "Oh, now it is an American Canal Zone!"

Nor was his answer altogether obscure, to one who had seen what had already been pointed out to me. There was the house which had been built for the Director-General, at stockholders' expense, at a cost of $100,000. There was also his summer house, at La Boca, which cost $150,000 of stockholders' money. He drew a salary of $50,000 a year, and got an extra allowance of $50 for every day-or fraction of a day-in which he travelled along the line in that sumptuous private car which had been provided for him at a cost of $42,000 of stockholders' money. Stables cost $600,000; the hospitals at Ancon cost $5,600,000, and those at Colon $1,400,000-they were needed, but they cost three times as much to the stockholders as they did to the builders. Office buildings, etc., cost-the stockholders-$5,250,000. Everywhere the grossest extravagance prevailed, and in addition to the extravagance there was invariably an enormous “rakeWhere a $50,000 building was needed, a $100,000 building was erected, at a corrupt cost of $200,000. The same conditions prevailed in the purchase of "supplies." In one place I saw where there had been stored a huge consignment of snow-shovels-thousands of them. Snow-shovels in Panama! In another place there had been received and stored some 15.000 kerosene torches, such as