Considering all these factors, it will not be considered an exaggerated estimate to state that eighty million dollars was saved to the United States Government by the sanitary work done on the Isthmus during the ten years of construction. That is, granting that the construction work could have been accomplished under such conditions as had existed during the construction period of the old French Company, or which existed on the Isthmus of Panama at any time prior to 1904, and granting that public sentiment in the United States would have allowed the prosecution of the work with such mortality among the laboring force as had previously occurred, it would have cost the United States eighty million dollars more than it actually did cost to accomplish the results it has attained on the Isthmus. I go into these figures to demonstrate that there is great financial profit resulting from money spent on such sanitary measures as we inaugurated on the Isthmus. This is the purely commercial side of the question. Of much greater importance is the moral argument that can be adduced from the saving of life and suffering that results from such measures. During the ten years of construction, we lost by death seventeen out of every thousand of our employees each year. That is, from the whole force of 39,000 men, 663 died each year, and for the whole construction period we lost 6,630 men. If sanitary conditions had remained as they had been previous to 1904, and we had lost, as did the French, two hundred of our employees out of each one thousand on the work, we should have lost 7,800 men each year, and 78,000 during the whole construction period. We therefore claim for the work of the Sanitary Department the saving of 71,370 human lives during the building of the Panama Canal. Where one man died, probably three would have returned home broken in health, with months and years of suffering and invalidism ahead of them. Sanitation on the Isthmus has saved this heavy toll to the devoted people engaged in this great work, and was, therefore a most wise and lucrative investment to our Government, and played a most important part in aiding the construction work in that great enterprise. But I believe that this aiding in the construction of the Canal is not the most important function that the sanitary work at Panama has played. The Canal Zone, for the past four hundred years, ever since it has been known by the white man, has been one of the most unhealthy spots in all the tropical world, and this fact has been generally known and recognized by all nations which have had any commercial importance.