pressure which they exerted.* Where the height and consequently the weight of the adjacent bank has been reduced, the alarming bulge ceases and the bed of the canal stays dug. Still this topping of the side crests or embankments in many places is costing another pretty penny.

It is well to bear this in mind and also to remember that when you look into the totals of the "cut," the tale is not so tragic as are some of the details. Barring a catastrophe, the "cut" will be completed early in 1913, nine months from now, and thanks to the unforeseen slides we will then have excavated twenty million cubic yards more than we bargained for. Fortunately, however, the cost price of the excavation that we did foresee has been so much smaller than we had any reason to hope it would be, that though we will have dug twenty million cubic yards more than we counted upon, the work is still within, and well within, the estimated cost.

In so far as it is permitted to the human finite eye to spy into the future to-day, this the greatest work of man since his activities began is eighty per cent. completed. To-day some of the great water-gates through which the argosies of the future are to pass into the south and eastern seas are completed and ajar, the light-houses at either entrance and the range lights within, so many beckoning beacons, flash out their invitation, calling attention, like so many gigantic electric signs, to the new route of commerce soon to be thrown open to the world. In the lake reservoir

*Observers are losing faith in the "angle of repose" doctrine and the "slides" are assigned by many to the same causes which are given here for the rising of the soil.

the precious indispensable water is rising nearly an inch a day and the "cut" section of the work is only dry because of a slender strip of earth or dike, at Matachin, a strip of earth which a steam-shovel could devour in less than half a day.

To-day, for the first time in eight years, the undoubted progress of the great work is apparent. Up to now progress was a matter for cold careful scientific calculation, to-day it is a matter of ocular demonstration. Formerly you could, of course, see the dirt fly, but the plot was so carefully concealed that the good of the flying dirt was really a matter of faith. To-day, however, not only is eighty per cent. of the work completed, but the end is in sight. The canal has taken shape and the purposeful coördination of all the detached works and isolated workers jumps to the eye of the most short-sighted tourist. Hardly a week passes without "finished" being written upon some important fraction of the work.

Barring some great and unforeseen catastrophe, all the masonry and the concrete will be completed by January 1, 1913. By July, next year, the air- and water-tight gates, which are to hold and control the floods of the Chagres, will be ready to perform their vital functions in the working of the canal. Three gates are already completed and, in operation, have been subjected to severe tests. Indeed by this date, July, 1913, the whole canal proper should be completed and there is every reason to believe it will be. The terminals may not be ready, and the back-filling of these gigantic concrete castles, which the engineers call locks may lag behind, but all these ragged edges will have been gathered up and smoothed out long be

fore the date of the official opening in 1915. To-day the railway yards at Balboa are being transferred to make room for the permanent dry-dock and basin on the Pacific side. It is to be hoped that this is the last transfer of this vagrant railway, which, though it enjoys the shortest route across the continent, has had its roadbed changed so frequently that if all the construction work on the Panama line had been permanent it would reach from the Isthmus to Patagonia, and form one of the longest railways in the world.

The dry-dock will be a thousand feet long and the first terminal pier, which is now well under way, will have the same length and be about two hundred feet wide. The two great coaling stations, one at Cristobal on the Atlantic, and the other at Balboa on the Pacific, will be ready for their grimy work some time before they will be needed. The lake is filling and the water will be permitted to rise until the fifty-foot level is reached. At this level in the lake the "cut and the locks will still remain high and dry until July, 1913, when, if all goes well, the great deluge will be inaugurated, as quietly as possible, of course. There will be a dramatic moment, doubtless, when the steam-shovels eat away the earthwork at Matachin, and the water rushes into the "cut" and the lower levels which it has cost so much hitherto to keep dry. But engineers shun drama, and the water rush will be contrived, as quietly as possible, probably by sluices. What will be the actual status of the waterway after this critical moment is passed, no one can say with precision, but it is hoped, and it is quite possible that in a very few weeks sea-going dredges will have dug out many of the remaining shoal places and

that, from this time on, freighters of medium tonnage will accomplish the transit of the Isthmus without difficulty.

The Atlantic side breakwater, stretching far out into Limon Bay, affording the ships from the North Atlantic and the oft-vexed Caribbean a safe and smooth refuge, is practically finished, and the mammoth breakwater on the Pacific side, from Balboa out to Naos Island, nearly, if not quite, three miles long, is, thanks to the spoils from the Culebra cut, growing into an ocean promontory with marvellous rapidity. A wonderfully safe harbour is the result, and some think an ideal naval base, until the dawn of the day when all that sort of thing can be thrown away into the rubbish heap.

None too soon are Congress and the Press occupying themselves with the important details of the permanent organisation and government of the canal, for unless all signs should prove deceptive and the hopes of conservative observers prove unfounded, in the early winter of 1913, while the canal may yet be far from completed, as it is proposed to build it, yet the two oceans, long asunder, will be joined by a gated waterway, freighters will be passing through, and the conquest of the centuries, a dream of five centuries at least, will have become an accomplished fact, and soon, very soon, merely a humdrum milestone in the path of man's progress.

Along the way which the old navigators dreamed of and knew must be achieved, the new navigators will penetrate the South Seas and the search for the western route to the Far East, which shaped history and,

* See Appendix, page 473.

incidentally peopled the Americas, will have ended. But the new lands, which the new route makes accessible and even brings near to our main travelled roads, are lands which the old navigators never dreamed of, and here, it seems to me, is the place to dwell upon the epoch-making feature of our work, that triumph of sanitation which has made the construction of the canal and residence on the Isthmus, not only possible, but even pleasant.

The far-reaching effects of this successful sanitary campaign cannot be over-estimated, indeed, I fear, with our old-fashioned ideas, which sad experience has instilled into our minds of how costly, in human lives, was the conquest of the tropics, when attempted by the individual, we cannot estimate it at all. But let us, at least, recall that, had the canal been completed twenty years ago, people would still have passed through it with bated breath and grave anxiety, some indeed, with medicated handkerchiefs before their nostrils. It is certain that the transit of the Isthmus was then regarded as an exceedingly dangerous and unpleasant stage in the journey to the promised lands beyond. To-day, however, thanks to the new science of sanitation and its apostles, who have risen from the ranks in our army medical corps, the promised lands lie near at hand, and those who seek them are not scourged by pest and pestilence. I have had the honour and the advantage of talking upon this momentous subject on several occasions with Colonel Gorgas, the man, who, despite his many modest protests, has contributed to this proud result more than any other man. He is of the opinion that the conquest of the tropics has been attained, and that, in