Mons. de Lesseps was an honest man, but was not a practical engineer. He was getting old at the time he undertook the work, and was in the hands of his friends. His friends, however, couldn’t do the work, so they did him; they wouldn’t work anyway, so they worked him every way. But the world still thinks well of him. He was too good for the world about him.
That the so-called Yankee is the man to build the canal is proved by a poem printed over fifty years ago in the London Punch (1851), of which the following is a quotation:
O’er Panama there was a scheme
Long talked of to pursue a
Short route—which many thought a dream
By Lake Nicaragúa.
John Bull discussed the plan on foot,
With slow irresolution,
While Yankee Doodle went and put
It into execution.