One of the narrowest parts of the Isthmus is that lying between the present Panama Canal route and the South American border. Three routes were proposed in this section, known as the Atrato River route, the Caledonia route, and the San Blas route. It was found that a canal built along any one of these routes would require a tunnel. The estimated cost of building a tunnel 35 feet deep, 100 feet wide at the bottom, and 117 feet on the waterline, with a height of 115 feet from the water surface, the entire tunnel being lined with concrete 5 feet thick, would approximate $22,500,000 a mile. The cost of building a canal along one of these routes would have been greater than that of building either the Nicaragua Canal or the Panama Canal. The question of an Isthmian Canal will probably be forever set at rest at no distant date. In an effort to forestall for all time any competition in the canal business across the American Isthmus, negotiations are now under way whereby the United States seeks to acquire the exclusive rights for a canal through Nicaragua, just as it now possesses exclusive rights for a canal through the Republic of Panama. The conclusion of the work at Panama will end the efforts of four centuries to open up a shipway from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the American Isthmus. CHAPTER XVII THE FRENCH FAILURE One writes of "the French failure" at Panama with a consciousness that no other word but failure will describe the financial and administrative catastrophe that humbled France on the Isthmus, but at the same time with the knowledge that failure is no fit word to apply to the engineering accomplishments of the French era. The French fiasco ruined thousands of thrifty French families who invested their all in the shares of the canal company because they had faith in de Lesseps, faith in France, and faith in the ability of the canal to pay handsome returns whatever might be its cost. The failure itself was due primarily to the fact that de Lesseps was not an engineer, but a promoter. The stock sales, the bond lottery, the pomp and circumstance of high finance, were more to him than exact surveys or frank discussion of actual engineering problems. From the first, de Lesseps ignored the engineers. The Panama proposition was undertaken in spite of their advice, and at every turn he hampered them by impossible demands, and by making grave decisions with a debonair turn of the hand. The next factor in the failure was corruption. Extravagance such as never was known wasted the sous and francs that came from the thrifty homes of that beautiful France. Corruption, graft, waste--there was never such a carnival of bad business.