In the latter countries the canal has all along been regarded with disfavour, not to say declared hostility. In the United States especially, M. de Lesseps has been told again and again that he was “beating the wind,” and that nothing but failure could come of his project. For the time being it looks as if his candid friends were right, and M. de Lesseps was wrong. As might be expected, there have been very conflicting calculations made as to the amount of traffic which an interoceanic canal on the American isthmus would be likely to carry. The Geographical Congress, held at Antwerp in 1871, did not venture to go beyond 4,000,000 tons per annum. When the Canal Company was started, the expected tonnage was raised to about 6,000,000 tons annually. In 1887 M. de Lesseps, in his letter to the French Premier, put the quantity at 7,500,000 tons. A writer in the _Revue-Gazette Maritime et Commerciale_ (Paris) has estimated that if the Panama Canal had been opened in 1884, there would have passed through it the following tonnage:— ──────────┬──────────┬─────────── │ Ships. │ Tonnage. ├──────────┼─────────── Europe │ 4,226 │ 4,650,390 Asia │ 2,255 │ 1,212,178 America │ 2,987 │ 3,441,598 ├──────────┼─────────── Totals │ 9,468 │ 9,304,166 ──────────┴──────────┴─────────── This latter estimate appears to be greatly exaggerated. It is apparently founded on the assumption that the greater part of the Australasian trade would pass that way. But the fact is that the geographical distance to Sydney does not differ by quite 500 knots between any of the four routes that are, or would be, available—that is, the Cape of Good Hope, the Suez Canal, Cape Horn, and Panama, the distances increasing in the order stated. Nautical distance, moreover, as has been properly remarked, “is only one element in determining choice of route; prevailing winds and currents, avoidance of stormy seas or of rock-bound coasts, have all to be studied by the mariner; and the comparatively trifling difference in the length of the course from the Thames to Sydney by four such different routes is enough to show how important it is to have this question of routes illustrated by the experience of the skilled navigator. This consideration is enhanced by the remark that the dues for the passage of the canal would amount to as much as the cost of more than 800 knots of additional voyage.”[191] A much more reasonable and modest estimate than that of either of the foregoing, is that made in a recent report on the proposed Nicaraguan Canal. This estimate, based ostensibly on the United States Treasury Reports, puts the total tonnage that would have made use of the canal in 1885 at 4,252,000 tons, which is stated to be an increase of 53 per cent. in six years. At the same rate of increase, the tonnage available in 1892, when the canal was expected to be completed, would be 6,506,000 tons.[192]