The French have spent four years and $20,000,000 on the Panama Canal, and have not made great progress. An American who worked for a year on the canal, and got off with his life, reports that fever is the great enemy of the undertaking. He says that five thousand deaths of workmen occurred in three months. The company kept fifteen thousand men at work by bringing in shiploads of new men as fast as death destroyed its workmen. If the canal is ever finished it will have cost a hundred and fifty millions of dollars, and as many thousand lives.
General Gordon is at this writing still shut up in Khartoum, and England seems to be doing nothing to save him. Egypt is politically and financially bankrupt, and Mr. Gladstone’s ministry is threatened with overthrow because it has not managed the unmanageable Nile question. There is only one easy settlement of Egyptian affairs, and that is an English government of Egypt.
The drunken man is an increasing nuisance. Recently, in a Brooklyn, N. Y. theater, he cried “fire,” and caused a frightful panic. In a New York City theater he was an alderman, and interrupted the performance long enough to get arrested and marched off to the lock-up. He is always engaged in quarrels in which blood is drawn. In a western city, last month, he killed his best friend. We all have other business, but we ought not to neglect this drunken man, or the places where he is manufactured.
Something new in the matter of mixed metaphor appears in the New York Times. A correspondent, writing of a political organization, described some elements of it as “cancerous barnacles.” We notice, too, a new verb in politics. A dreary and egoistic speaker at a convention is said to have “pepper-sauced himself over an impatient audience.”
A wealthy New Yorker, recently deceased, disposed by will of some two millions of property which he had gained chiefly through the rewards and opportunities of public position. He bequeathed only $15,000 to benevolent causes. A man has the right to dispose of his estate as he will; but then the public has a judgment as to whether he disposes of it in the right way. And less than one per cent. to benevolence is not the right proportion.