Immediately after the adjournment of the International Congress at Paris the stock of the canal company, $60,000,000 as a first issue, was offered to the investing public. It was largely over-subscribed. The French are at once a thrifty and an emotional people. Their thrift gives them instant command of such sums of ready cash as astound financiers of other nations. Their emotionalism leads them to support any great national enterprise that promises glory for _La Patrie_, has in it a touch of romance and withal seems economically safe. The canal enterprise at the outset met all these conditions, and the commanding figure of De Lesseps at its head, the man who had made Africa an island and who dogmatically declared, “the Panama Canal will be more easily begun, finished and maintained than the Suez Canal,” lured the francs from their hiding places in woolen stockings or under loose hearth stones. [Illustration: THE POWER OF THE JUNGLE Note how the tree has grown around and into this steel dump car at San Pablo] [Illustration: LA FOLIE DINGLER This house, built by the French for $150,000, was sold for $25.00 by the Americans] [Illustration: NEAR THE PACIFIC ENTRANCE TO THE CANAL The suction dredge is an inheritance from the French and still working] It has been the practice of many writers upon the canal to ridicule the unsuccessful effort of the French to complete it; to expatiate upon the theatrical display which attended their earlier operations, and the reckless extravagance which attended the period when the dire possibility of failure first appeared to their vision; to overlook the earnest and effective work done by the Frenchmen actually on the Isthmus while riveting attention on the blackmailers and parasites in Paris who were destroying the structure at its very foundations. It is significant that none of the real workers on the canal do this. Talk with the engineers and you will find them enthusiastic over the engineering work done by the French. Those sturdy, alert Americans who are now putting the Big Job through will take pains to give their predecessors the fullest credit for work done, for dirt moved, for surveys made and for machinery designed--a great lot of it is in use on the line today, including machines left exposed in the jungle twenty years. Hundreds of their buildings are still in use. If, after listening to the honest and generous praise expressed by our engineers, the visitor will go out to the cemetery of Mount Hope, near Cristobal, and read the lines on the headstones of French boys who came out full of hope and ambition to be cut down at twenty-two, twenty-five--all boyish ages--he will reflect that it is ill to laugh because the forlorn hope does not carry the breastworks, but only opens the way for the main army. And there are many little French graveyards scattered about the Isthmus which make one who comes upon them unawares feel that the really vital thing about the