This is not the place to describe the disorderly retreat of the French forces, who hastily abandoned work and workers, tools and machines, like so much wreckage of a hopeless disaster. Some of the rascals and swindlers were punished; many others escaped. The aged de Lesseps—acclaimed as a hero yesterday, denounced as a traitor to-day—died of a broken heart. Thousands of poor people lost their little savings and with them their hope of comfort in their old age. When the United States offered to pay forty million dollars for all that the French company had accomplished, and all that it possessed in the way of equipment, plans, and privileges, the stockholders were only too glad to close the bargain.
The whole story of how the United States went about this world job makes one of the most interesting chapters of our history. It is, however, “another story.” We cannot here go into the matter of how Panama became a republic independent of Colombia, and how the United States purchased for ten million dollars a strip of land ten miles wide, five miles on either side of the canal, across the isthmus. This Canal Zone is “as much the territory of the United States as the parade-ground at West Point,” the ports of Balboa and Cristobal are
American, and the United States holds the right to enforce sanitary regulations in the cities of Panama and Colon at either end of the canal and to preserve order when the Panama authorities prove unequal to the task.