He will miss the life on the Isthmus. He was worked harder, he was treated better, and he was paid higher wages there than he ever will be again in his life. Perhaps he has saved; if so, he retires to be a nabob. Perhaps he has wasted; if so, he must go back to the hand-to-mouth existence that he knew in the days before. But after all, the experience of the thousands of West Indian negroes employed on the canal will have a stimulating effect on their home countries, and their general level of industrial and social conditions will be raised. At any rate, the American Republic always must stand indebted to these easy-going, care-free black men who supplied the brawn to break the giant back of Culebra. CHAPTER XIV THE COMMISSARY To build the canal required the labor of some fifty thousand men. To induce these men to go to Panama, to stay there, to work there, and to work there efficiently, was no light undertaking. Health was promised them by the most efficient sanitary organization that ever battled with disease. Wealth was promised them, relatively speaking, in the form of wages and salaries much higher than they could obtain at home for the same work. But health and wealth, much desired and much prized as they are, can not of themselves compensate for transplanting a man to an alien shore and an alien atmosphere, especially if that shore be tropic and that atmosphere hot. There must also be comfort. And comfort was promised to the canal diggers by the commissary department. Good food at prices cheaper than one pays in the United States, and quarters of the best--these things the commissary held out as a part of the rewards at Panama. Of course this was not the chief object of the commissary department--it was the incidental factor that in the end almost obscured the main issue. The main business was so well done that everybody took it for granted, just as no one will remark about the sun shining although that is the most important fact we know. The main business of the commissary was to keep the canal diggers fed and housed so that they would have the strength for their tasks. How this was done, how fresh beef and ice cream were made daily staples in tropic Panama, how the canal army was fed, is a big story in itself.