The fight then against disease on the Isthmus resolved itself largely into a war of extermination upon the two noxious varieties of mosquitoes. It involved first a cleaning up, paving and draining of the two towns. Curiously enough bad smells are not necessarily unhygienic, but they betoken the existence of matter that breeds disease germs, and flies and other insects distribute those germs where they will do the most harm. Colon and Panama therefore were paved and provided with sewage systems, while somewhat stringent ordinances checked the pleasant Panama practice of emptying all slops from the front gallery into the street. It is fair to the Panamanians to note that in the end they will pay for the vigorous cleaning and refurbishing of their towns by the Americans. Our sanitary forces did the work and did it well, by virtue of the clause in the treaty which grants the United States authority to prosecute such work in the two cities and collect from the householder its cost by means of water and sewage rates. [Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_ SANITARY WORK IN A VILLAGE The scene is in the outskirts of Culebra, now a model of cleanliness] This work was completed in 1908 and the final report of the Division of Municipal Engineering which conducted it showed that nearly $6,000,000 had been expended, of which about $2,250,000 was for pavements, sewers and waterworks in the two cities, and about $3,500,000 for work in the Canal Zone. Nearly a million more was subsequently expended in the towns. The first thing to do with the towns was to fumigate them. The Panamanians did not like this. Neither would we or any other people for that matter, for the process of fumigating necessarily interrupts the routine of life, invades domestic privacy, inevitably causes some loss by the discoloring of fabrics, interrupts trade in the case of stores and is in general an infernal nuisance. That much any people will say against wholesale fumigation. But to the Panamanians it was peculiarly offensive because they were immune from yellow fever anyway, and to some extent from malaria as well, so to their minds the whole thing was an imposition by which the Americans alone would profit. If the gringoes weren’t able to live in Panama without smoking people out of house and home, they had better stay away was the generally expressed public opinion of Panama.