Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

[3] Denotes credit.

It will be observed that since the beginning of the fiscal year 1913, expenditures have averaged a trifle over $3,000,000 a month. This rate of expenditure may be expected to decrease somewhat during the eighteen months likely to elapse before the Canal, terminals and forts are completed. Probably if we allow $250,000 a month for this decrease we will be near the mark making the future expenditures average $2,750,000 monthly until January, 1915, making in all $57,750,000. Adding this to the Commission expenditures up to March 31, 1913, and adding further the $50,000,000 paid to the French stockholders and the Republic of Panama we reach the sum of $396,863,593—a reasonable estimate of the final cost of the great world enterprise; the measure in dollars and cents of the greatest gift ever made by a single nation to the world.

It is worth noting that all this colossal expenditure of money has been made without any evidence of graft, and practically without charge of that all-pervading canker in American public work. During a long stay on the Isthmus, associating constantly with men in every grade of the Commission’s service, I never heard a definite charge of illegal profits being taken by anyone concerned in the work. In certain publications dealing with the undertaking in its earlier days one will find assertions of underhanded collusion with contractors and of official raids upon the more select importations of the Commissary without due payment therefore. But even these charges were vague, resting only on hearsay, and had to do with an administration which vanished six or more years ago. Today that chronic libeler “the man in the street” has nothing to say about graft in connection with Canal contracts, and “common notoriety”, which usually upholds all sorts of scandalous imputations, and is cited to maintain various vague allegations, is decidedly on the side of official integrity at Panama.

This is not to say that the work has been conducted with an eye single to economy. It has not. That is to say it has not been conducted in accordance with the common idea of economy. All over the land contractors, apprehensive of the effect of the Panama example of government efficiency in public work, are telling how much more cheaply they could have dug the Panama Canal. Probably they could if they could have dug it at all. But the sort of economy they are talking about was definitely abandoned when Col. Gorgas convinced the Commission that it was reckless extravagance to save $50,000 or so on wire screens and lose forty or fifty lives in a yellow-fever epidemic. The contractor’s idea of economy was emphatically set aside when Col. Goethals determined that it was cheaper to pay engineers one-third more than the current rate at home, and make such arrangements for their comfort on the Zone that they would stay on the job, rather than to pay ordinary prices and have them leave in haste after a month or two of dissatisfied and half-hearted work.

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood.

THE TUG BOHIO WITH BARGES IN MIDDLE GATUN LOCK

From which it appears that a new definition of “economy” is needed in the application of the word to the Canal work.

Whatever may be the influence of the Canal on the position of the United States as a world power, its influence on the industrial life at home is likely to be all pervasive and revolutionary. The government is the largest employer of labor in the land. It ought to be the best employer. On the Zone it has been the best employer, and has secured the best results. When government work is to be done hereafter it will not be let out to private contractors without hesitation and discussion. A consideration of the results obtained by the State of New York in its latest expenditure, by the methods of private contract, of the Erie Canal appropriation of $101,000,000, will go far to show the superiority of the Panama system. In a recent interview the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, declared it to be the policy of the Department to build battleships in navy yards so far as possible—a policy which the shipbuilding interests have steadily resisted in the past. It is not too much to infer that the success of the army in digging a canal encouraged the Secretary to show what the navy could do in building its own ships.