The Bay of San Juan de Nicaragua, on the contrary, is remarkably free from storms, and the San Juan is not a swamp river. It is the effluent of a chain of rockbound lakes, one of them of sufficient extent to equalize the drainage of torrents from above, so that an overflow of the San Juan could be caused only by the simultaneous rising of all its lower tributaries, aided by a northwest gale that would drive the waters of the lake toward the estuary. A conjunction of that sort occurred in the summer of 1872, when the San Juan rose some twenty feet in as many hours; but even then the river did not shoal its delta, but tore out a new channel through Costa Rican territory, which now receives a lion’s share of the outflow; but there is no doubt that an isolated mishap of that sort can be remedied by a short-line canal from the coast to a point above the divergence of the rival streams, or by the same means that reclaimed the channel of the Mississippi at New Orleans. Further up all serious difficulties cease. The rapids of the San Juan can be passed by locks of moderate depth, the total difference between the level of Lake Nicaragua and that of the Atlantic being hardly twenty-five feet. The lake itself will need no improvements. Throughout its breadth of seventy-five miles (three fifths of the distance from ocean to ocean) it maintains an average depth of fifteen fathoms, has no dangerous sandbanks, no driftwood islands, while its undercurrents secure it against the danger of being shoaled by the floods of its affluents. The project of locating the western terminus at Port Brito, on the Pacific, would reduce the length of the canal proper to about twenty-eight miles, and shorten the trip for vessels from our ports by nearly seven hundred miles—the distance from Port Brito to Panama. The question is, if all these advantages would justify the construction of a second canal. For we need not delude ourselves with the fear—or hope—that the Panama project would be abandoned; the _present_ interests of the French stockholders, if not the name of Monsieur de Lesseps, is a guarantee that their work will be completed. They have gone too far[A] to retreat before the completion of a single rival; for on the other hand it is equally sure that the Tehuantepec scheme has lost its last hope of practical support, since even the promise of a monopoly could hardly override the veto of Nature. It is enough to say that the Mexican projectors admit that the proposed route through the lowest gap of the Chimalapa Range would require the construction of _one hundred and forty locks_—with the alternative of tunneling through thirty miles of granite rocks—for we know how nearly a difference of fifteen locks defeated the chances of the Wellington canal against its American rivals.