The Panama Canal

by Frederic J. Haskin

THE FRENCH FAILURE

One writes of "the French failure" at Panama with a consciousness that no other word but failure will describe the financial and administrative catastrophe that humbled France on the Isthmus, but at the same time with the knowledge that failure is no fit word to apply to the engineering accomplishments of the French era.

The French fiasco ruined thousands of thrifty French families who invested their all in the shares of the canal company because they had faith in de Lesseps, faith in France, and faith in the ability of the canal to pay handsome returns whatever might be its cost. The failure itself was due primarily to the fact that de Lesseps was not an engineer, but a promoter. The stock sales, the bond lottery, the pomp and circumstance of high finance, were more to him than exact surveys or frank discussion of actual engineering problems.

From the first, de Lesseps ignored the engineers. The Panama proposition was undertaken in spite of their advice, and at every turn he hampered them by impossible demands, and by making grave decisions with a debonair turn of the hand.

The next factor in the failure was corruption. Extravagance such as never was known wasted the sous and francs that came from the thrifty homes of that beautiful France. Corruption, graft, waste—there was never such a carnival of bad business.

And then the French had to fight the diseases of the tropic jungles without being armed with that knowledge that gave the Americans the victory over yellow fever and malaria. It was hardly to be expected that the French ever would discover the necessity of substituting the Y. M. C. A. and the soda fountain for the dance hall and the vintner's shop, if the canal were to be completed.

But the engineers did their work well, as far as they were permitted to go. It may have cost too much—but it was well done. The failure of the French Panama Canal project was due, therefore, to moral as much as to material reasons.

Long years after the French had retired defeated from the field, one could behold a thousand mute but eloquent reminders of their failure to duplicate their triumph at Suez. From one side of the Isthmus to the other stretched an almost unbroken train of gloomy specters of the disappointed hopes of the French people.

Here a half-mile string of engines and cars; there a long row of steam cranes; at this place a mass of nondescript machinery; and at that place a big dredge left high and dry on the banks of the mighty Chagres at its flood stage, all spoke to the visitor of the French defeat. Exposed to the ravages of 20 tropical summers, decay ran riot, and but for the scenes of life and industry being enacted by the Americans, one might have felt himself stalking amid the tombs of thousands of dead hopes.

Almost as much money was raised by the French for their failure as was appropriated by the Americans for their success. From the gilded palace and from the peasant's humble cottage came the stream of gold with which it was hoped to lay low the barrier that divided the Atlantic and the Pacific. At first the French estimated that in seven or eight years they could dig a 29-foot sea-level canal for $114,000,000. After eight years they calculated that it would cost $351,000,000 to make it a 15-foot lock canal and require 20 years to build it.