did the most creditable work on the project, dredging thirteen miles, making fortunes for themselves and leaving machines which the Americans repaired and used from 1904 onward.

As estimated by M. de Lesseps, the sea-level canal was to cost $131,600,000, although the Paris congress had gone higher in its figures. He was, of course, sadly mistaken in this estimate and the French ultimately spent twice that amount before throwing up the sponge. Conditions totally were different from those at Suez. There the sandy dunes rose no higher than forty feet above sea-level at any point and excavation work comparatively was easy. In Panama a mountainous configuration with solid rock a short depth beneath the surface had to be faced, with torrential streams to be controlled and diverted.

Operations went ahead rapidly from 1880 onward, the method being to let contracts for the different phases of the work. The canal started near Colon, in Limon Bay, and was to follow the valley of the Chagres River for about thirty miles, thence through the continental divide to the Pacific, three miles west of Panama, about where the present canal begins.

By 1885, however, extravagance and graft had emptied the company's treasury. The contractors, as a rule, did little and exacted much. It became apparent, too, that a sea-level type presented staggering difficulties. M. de Lesseps gave his consent to a change in plans to a lock type, as had been recommended by the engineer Lepinay, but the dam was to be at Bohio, instead of at Gatun. Bohio is seven

teen miles from the Caribbean, while Gatun is only seven miles distant from that sea.

All the theatrical methods conceivable were employed to float a new bond issue for $160,000,000, but the public had grown dubious over the success of the enterprise. The amount was raised, however, and was poured into the project with more millions until 1889 when, after $234,795,017 had been invested, the company became bankrupt. Of this vast amount, $157,224,689 had been invested on the Isthmus, the remainder having gone to organization expenses, for promotion, and overhead expenses generally. For engineering and construction, $89,434,225 had been spent; for machinery and materials, $29,722,856; for buildings, hospitals, etc., $15,397,282. Various needs and graft absorbed the rest.

The French treated their white employees with extravagant generosity. Living accommodations were on a scale of open-handed liberality. Little was done, beyond building hospitals, to conquer the bad health conditions of the Isthmus, and, while the French left patterns for much of the later American activities, the sanitary control of the jungle distinctively is an American triumph. The death rate among French employees on the canal was from two to three times as high as under the Americans.

Older natives in Panama still speak of the period of French operations as the "temps de luxe." M. de Lesseps was charged with fraudulent manipulation of the company's affairs, but escaped punishment for his alleged wrongs. There was graft everywhere, and

when the Americans invoiced the property left by the French they found stores of articles that had been bought in quantities absurdly beyond the needs of the enterprise. The purchase of the Panama Railroad, while at a high figure, was the only investment by the French that approximated sound judgment.

In 1890, an extension of ten years to the time for completing the canal was granted by Colombia, and subsequently extensions were permitted that advanced the life of the concession until October 31, 1910. A new Panama Canal Company was organized in 1894 with a capital of $13,000,000, and while it spent this amount and more, it never attained the momentum of the first company. The maximum force under the first company was 25,000 men and under the second régime 3,000.

The total excavation by the French in Panama was 78,000,000 yards, of which the first company took out 65,000,000 yards. Between Gold Hill and Contractors Hill, where the surface at the center line of the canal was 312 feet above sea-level, the French dug down 161 feet, this being the deepest cut they made. It is here that the work they did was useful to the American plans for a canal, but out of all their work only 29,908,000 yards were excavated from the present American route. For years before the Americans came the French did just enough work to keep their concession alive.

Summing up, the efforts of the French in Panama were a lamentable failure, but it probably is true that a private company of any nation would have met the

same fate. The riot of graft that attended the French effort is its chief blot, just as the honest construction of the canal by the American government is its chief honor. Indisputably, the French efforts made the American effort easier. Much that they did stood as landmarks to guide our way. Much that they failed to do emphasized the work cut out for us before success could be attained.

The mechanical equipment we took over from the French, the houses and hospitals, and especially the engineering records, were invaluable from the start of American operations and much still is in use. In 1912 there were 112 French locomotives, seven ladder dredges, hundreds of dump cars, machine-shop equipment, and other materials in profusion actively employed in canal construction.

An effort was made by the French company in 1898 to interest the United States government in the enterprise, provided permission could be secured from Colombia, but this failed, and the plan of 1903, for turning the property over to the United States, was its successor.

To-day, as one views the abandoned French equipment, overgrown by the luxuriant tropical vegetation, he is reminded of the retreat from Moscow. The quaint locomotives and machinery lying desolate and rusting away suggest the batteries that Napoleon left in the Russian snows. Indeed, there was much of the same exquisite French dash about the two enterprises that ended so disastrously.

CHAPTER VI

F

THE AMERICANS IN PANAMA

OREIGN activities in Panama were watched,

officially and unofficially, by the Americans with profound interest, and with a desire that the construction of a canal should be the work of the United States. The thought of communication between the oceans being in European hands was distasteful to

our statesmen.

The Monroe doctrine seemed broad enough to shut out foreign governments, but not private corporations of such governments, from acquiring the territory through which to dig the canal. However noisily the Monroe doctrine might be flaunted by the orators of the United States, our international position in 1850 did not give it anything like the weight that has attached to it ever since the Spanish-American War woke Europe to our strength.

In 1852, when the Panama Railroad was being built, a captain of a company in the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, Ulysses S. Grant, crossed the Isthmus at Panama, on his way to the new California post. There were 1,800 men in the command, which arrived at Colon on July 16th of that year. They used the new railroad as far as it had been constructed, twenty or thirty miles, and the remainder of the trip was by the traditional mule-back system. An epidemic