The United States Government will have to continue with the utmost care its work of sanitation and quarantine at Panama. If, after the canal is completed, an epidemic of bubonic plague or yellow fever should break out, it might very seriously interfere with the operation of the canal in several ways. To begin with, it would demoralize the operating force. Further than this, India and China are afraid of yellow fever because in both of these countries the stegomyia mosquito abounds. If the disease should obtain a foothold there it would be difficult to exterminate. Europe, also, might be expected to quarantine against Panama under such conditions. A 10,000-ton freighter carrying cargo through the canal would lose at least a thousand dollars for every day it was detained in quarantine by reason of having visited the canal. A shrewd observer has said that the successful sanitation of the Isthmus of Panama is a triumph at once of medical science and of despotic government. Probably this does not overstate the case. The methods employed at Panama were arbitrary, and had to be. They probably could not be enforced at all in a democratic community in ordinary times. The people would rebel against the severity of the regulations and against the incidental invasion of their privacy. But strike any community, however free, with the fear of a swift and deadly disease and it will submit--as witness the shot-gun quarantines that used to demark the northern limits of the yellow fever zone in our own Southern States, or the despotism that governed New Orleans in the terror of 1905. At Panama this fear is ever present, so there is little danger that a responsible majority there ever would resist the sanitary work on the grounds of outraged democracy. It may be that a popular government would become careless, or inefficient, but it would not renounce the pretension. This has been proved in Cuba. The sanitarians at Panama gave to the workers there a sense of security that contributed no little to the spirit of determination so universally remarked and commended by visitors to the Zone during the era of construction. While there was no immunity from sickness and death, yet there was no panic, no constant dread, such as destroyed the morale of the French force. The Isthmus of Panama still remained hot, its inhabitants still were forced to take the precautions that aliens must take in the Tropics; but they were inspired with a confidence that if these precautions were taken they would not be in any greater danger than if they had remained in their northern homes. Pestilence, the scourge of the on-sweeping epidemic, the plague of swift death that is only a little worse than the panic of fear it inspires--this was the thing that was stamped out.