In the first place, the French undertook to build the canal as a money-making proposition. People in every grade of social and industrial life in France contributed from their surpluses and from their hard-earned savings money to buy shares in the canal company in the hope that it would yield a fabulously rich return. Estimates of the costs of the undertaking, made by the engineers, were arbitrarily cut down by financiers, with the result that repeated calls were made for more money and the shareholders soon found to their dismay that they must contribute more and yet more before they could hope for any return whatever. From the beginning to the end, the French Canal Company was concerned more with problems of promotion and finance than with engineering and excavation. As a natural result of this spirit at the head of the undertaking the whole course of the project was marred by an orgy of graft and corruption such as never had been known. Every bit of work was let out by contract, and the contractors uniformly paid corrupt tribute to high officers in the company. No watch was set on expenditures; everything bought for the canal was bought at prices too high; everything it had to sell was practically given away. In the next place, the French were pitiably at the mercy of the diseases of the Tropics. The science of preventive medicine had not been sufficiently developed to enable the French to know that mosquitoes and filth were enemies that must be conquered and controlled before it would be possible successfully to attack the land barrier. Yellow fever and malaria killed engineers and common laborers alike. The very hospitals, which the French provided for the care of the sick, were turned into centers of infection for yellow fever, because the beds were set in pans of water which served as ideal breeding places for the death-bearing stegomyia. In this atmosphere of lavish extravagance caused by the financial corruption, and in the continual fear of quick and awful death, the morals of the French force were broken; there was no determined spirit of conquest; interest centered in champagne and women; the canal was neglected. Yet, in spite of this waste, this corruption of money and morals, much of the work done by the French was of permanent value to the Americans; and without the lessons learned from their bitter experience it would have been impossible for the Americans or any other people to have completed the canal so quickly and so cheaply. The Americans brought to the task another spirit. The canal was to be constructed not in the hope of making money, but, rather, as a great national and popular undertaking, designed to bring the two coasts of the great Republic in closer communication for purposes of commerce and defense.