The husband paid back the money he had confiscated and the pair stayed.
Family affairs are aired in the Colonel’s court to a degree which must somewhat abash that simple and direct warrior. What the dramatists call “the eternal triangle” is not unknown on the Zone, nor is the unscriptural practice of coveting your neighbor’s wife wholly without illustration. For such situations the Colonel’s remedy is specific and swift—deportation of the one that makes the trouble. Sometimes the deportation of two has been found essential, but while gossip of these untoward incidents is plentiful in the social circles of Culebra and Ancon the judge in the case takes no part in it.
It is not in me to write a character sketch of Col. Goethals. That is rather a task for one who has known him intimately and has been able to observe the earlier manifestations of those qualities that led President Roosevelt to select him as the supreme chief of the canal work. All his life he has been an army engineer, having a short respite from active work in the field when he was professor of engineering at West Point. Fortifications and locks were his specialties and fortifications and locks have engaged his chief attention since he undertook the Panama job. Perhaps it is due to his intensely military attitude that the public has insensibly come to look upon the canal in its quality as an aid to national defense rather than a stimulus to national commerce. For the Colonel any discussion of the need for fortifying the canal was the merest twaddle, and he had his way. He begged long for a standing army of 25,000 men on the Zone, but it is doubtful whether he will win this fight. Moreover he would so subordinate all considerations to the military one that he urges the expulsion from the Zone of all save canal employees that the danger of betrayal may be less. How far that policy shall be approved by Congress is yet to be determined. Thus far however the Colonel has handled Congress with notable success and even there his dominant spirit may yet triumph.
THE COLONEL’S FIRE WORKS
A big blast in Culebra Cut. In one year 27,252 tons of dynamite were used
Power on the Zone, however, autocratic and absolute, Col. Goethals possesses. It was conferred on him formally by the order of Jan. 6, 1908, giving the Chairman authority to reorganize the service at his own discretion, subject of course to review by the President or Secretary of War. The first effect of this was the abolition of a large list of departments with high sounding names, and concentration of their functions in the quartermaster’s department with Major C. A. Devol at its head. The Colonel developed in fact a rage for abolishing and concentrating departments. He did not go quite as far as Nero who wished that Rome had but one neck that he might strike off its head at a blow, but he certainly reduced the number of responsible chiefs to such a point that it was easy to place the fault if work lagged or blunders multiplied.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
A HEAVY BLAST UNDER WATER
Col. Goethals’ first annual report was issued after he had been in command only three months, covering therefore nine months of the Stevens administration, and was dated at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 1907. He reported that 80 per cent. of the plant necessary for completing the work was on the ground or had been ordered. When he arrived the high water-mark for excavating in Culebra Cut was 900,000 cubic yards a month, and since his rule began it has never fallen below the million mark, except in May, 1908. It may be noted in passing, that during the first two years of his administration the average for excavation along the whole line exceeded three million cubic yards a month. During the whole administration of Messrs. Wallace and Stevens only six million yards had been removed. The contrasting figures are given not as reflecting on the earlier engineers, but as indicating the rapidity with which the equipment and efficiency of the canal organization were increased when the battle of the levels was ended and the civilian commission done away with.