With all of their profligacy, however, the French left to their American successors a valuable heritage. What they did was done with the utmost thoroughness. The machinery which they bequeathed to the Americans was of immense value. There was enough of this to cover a 500-acre farm 3 feet deep, with enough more to build a 6-foot fence around it all. The French equipment was of the best. Dredges and locomotives that stood in the jungle for 20 years were rebuilt by the Americans at less than 10 per cent of their first cost, and did service during the entire period of construction.
Although the New Panama Canal Company at one time asked $150,000,000 for its assets, it finally accepted $40,000,000. An appraisement made by American engineers a few years ago showed that the actual worth of the property acquired, aside from the franchise itself, amounted to about $42,000,000.
Count de Lesseps lived to a great age. His last years were saddened and embittered by the volumes of denunciation that were written and spoken against him. Certain it is that no man ever went further than he to maintain confidence in a project that was destined to fail, and yet his partisans declared that his sin was the sin of overenthusiasm and not of dishonest purpose. Under the torrents of abuse that fell upon his head his mind weakened, and, fortunately, in his last days he realized little of the immeasurable injustice his misplaced zeal and overenthusiasm had wrought against the people of France.
CHAPTER XVIII
CHOOSING THE PANAMA ROUTE
Proud as Americans now are of the success of their venture at Panama, in the beginning there was by no means a general agreement that the United States would succeed where France had failed. Indeed, the French disaster had much influence in strengthening the position of those who favored building the American canal through Nicaragua.
Prior to the year 1900 little thought was given by the American people to any project for building an Isthmian Canal anywhere else than through Nicaragua. It is true that in 1897 the New Panama Canal Company became active in its efforts to induce the United States to adopt the Panama route, but these activities made little impression upon public sentiment before the outbreak of the Spanish American War. During that war interest in the question of an Isthmian Canal waned in America, and immediately after it the sympathy which France had given to Spain made it advisable for the Canal Company to postpone its propaganda.
In his annual message to Congress in December, 1898, President McKinley recommended the building of the Nicaragua Canal. Two days later Senator John T. Morgan, of Alabama, made a vigorous speech in the Senate, in which he charged that the transcontinental railroads of the United States were making efforts to defeat the canal project. This charge was made repeatedly thereafter, and it was asserted that the railroads espoused the cause of the Panama Canal upon the ground of choosing the lesser of two evils, judged from their standpoint. Prior to 1900 both Republican and Democratic parties had repeatedly favored the construction of the Nicaragua Canal in their national platforms, and both branches of Congress had voted for the canal at different times.