“My friends, a disaster has overtaken us,”--the crowd before the President seemed to compress itself in a further effort to get closer to him, “and it is our duty to remain firm and unfalteringly confident. I can scarcely doubt that you all have heard that nature has destroyed the Nation’s work. The face of the earth at the Isthmus of Panama is altered. Our work, our expenditures, the lives of thousands of hard working men have been sacrificed, and we stand aghast before a natural revolution unequaled in our day, unparalled perhaps in all the annals of history; something which in its wide devastating power, crushes our pride, and for a moment makes us cease to think, to plan, to build. I come to you this morning with strange tidings--tidings so unspeakably great in their influence upon our knowledge, that I almost hesitate to pronounce them, lest I might find myself the victim of some horrible and wicked hoax. The Isthmus of Panama, from Quibo Island in Montijo Bay, on the west, to the confines of the valley of the Atrato River at the edge of the Columbia, on the east, is deviously, here with a regular movement of depression, in another place with violent shock, sinking beneath the waters of the opposite encroaching oceans that swings backward and forward on either side in awful tidal deluges. “The latest news confirms all the previous reports. Slowly, surely, even with hastening steps, the narrow neck of Panama, with its shallow shores, its long exposure of swamp and mud flats, with its crumbling hills, covered with tropical life will be engulfed, and the two continents of North and South America will return to a pristine condition of geographical autonomy. It is hard to believe. I cannot recount to you the wonderful pictures, terror-inspiring, and yet majestic with the majesty of Nature’s awful deeds, which have been sent to us. The loss of life has been considerable, but not proportionate to the stupendous agencies involved. After the first earthquake upheavals, the quickly succeeding disappearance of the solid ground furnished an adequate warning, and the populations along the canal-way at the villages and camps, and at Aspinwall and Panama, retreated to the hills, and with them the animal life, in a singular copartnership of fear. It is now regarded as certain, that we are about to see the last vestiges of the canal itself, the work of these last four years disappearing in the folding in and submergence of the rock strata.”