A word or two should be said about the wages earned on the canal. The West Indian recruit was offered 6½d. an hour for common labour and an eight-hour day, in addition to free quarters, medical care, and repatriation. Meals were supplied to him at the rate of 1s. 2½d. per day. Later the pay of all not under contract was reduced to 5d. per hour, and the price of the three meals to 1s. 1½d. Negro artisans, such as carpenters, masons, blacksmiths and others, of whom there were some 5,000 employed in connection with the canal works, received pay varying from 8d. to 22d. per hour. There were in 1912 4,400 negro artisans receiving 8d. an hour or more, while 400 received 1s. an hour, and the work was constant.
The European labourer, in addition to free quarters, received $1.60 per eight-hour day, and more for overtime work. He was charged 40 cents a day for his three meals, which left him a minimum net wage per day of $1.20, or a little less than thirty shillings a week. Many, however, received more, and a good number of Spanish work-people must have gone home with a nice little nest-egg in their pockets.
The skilled labour was done almost entirely by United States employees, though the "gold roll," as it was called, included at first some Europeans. The pay was excellent, the social life, with its gymnasia, billiard-rooms, concerts and so forth, attractive, and the commissariat, with its three good meals at a fixed charge, quite up to the standard of a good hotel. The billets on the isthmus were therefore popular, and about 7,000 Americans on an average have been in employment there.
As I have pointed out, the responsibility for the construction of the canal was vested in the President of the United States, who acted through an executive commission resident in the canal zone. The work was organized in a large number of departments, each responsible for a big task. These were excavation and dredging; locks and dams; machinery and buildings (also responsible for paving and other improvements in Colon and Panama); labour, subsistence, and quarters; material and supplies; sanitation (responsible also for hygiene in Panama and Colon, which towns are technically outside the zone); civil administration; the Panama railroad. There were also some smaller divisions, such as accounts and an office of a purchasing officer in Washington, nearly all the supplies for the canal being obtained in the United States. It should be added that the Republic of Panama is responsible for the policing of the two big towns, but the department of civil administration of the Panama Canal Commission employed 200 police, 88 of which were native West Indians.
This busy hive of labour will soon present a very different aspect. With the approach of the canal to completion the numbers of the workmen will gradually be reduced. A drastic process of sifting and selection will be carried out among the Americans employed on the works. Only about 2,500 men will be necessary to operate the canal, when it is in full working order. These will be established at the locks and other important points. In fact, the canal authorities recommend a complete depopulation of the isthmus except, of course, the terminal cities and the operating stations on the canal. Otherwise, they think, a large expense for sanitation will be necessary which might thus be avoided. But the question of defence must not be forgotten. It will certainly be found advisable to maintain a pretty large American garrison at the isthmus, and to the population we have mentioned perhaps even 8,000 American troops must be added. The busy scenes still prevailing in the canal zone will now soon have disappeared like a dream, and the future traveller who looks from the ship-rail over the shining waters of Gatun Lake or beyond to the vast and silent tropical forest will have difficulty in reconstructing the spectacle which the narrow lands presented during the ten strenuous years of construction.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] The Times, September 26, 1912.
[14] This is the figure of official recruiting. Very many more came to the isthmus of their own accord.