“We cannot avoid the remark that if the Inter-oceanic Canal be regarded, not as a Bourse speculation, but as an excavation which it is proposed to make by human agency, the question of its actual feasibility has not yet been really entered upon. An excavation which, if the last accounts of the borings be correct, would contain at least twenty times the bulk of the great pyramid; an embankment holding more than a third of the contents of that excavation, and requiring twenty-six years for its execution at the wholly unprecedented rate (from one end) of a million cubic yards in a year; a canal displacing for its execution a torrential river of four times the volume of the Thames in its heaviest flood, and with its bed at a depth of thirty feet below sea level—all this to be done while as yet the preliminary observations of rainfall, river discharge, and cross section of country have to be made—the proposal of such an enterprise seems rather worthy to adorn the name of Alexandre Dumas, or of the author of the tales of the Arabian Nights, than that of any person familiar with the practical execution of engineering work.”[200] With reference to the actual state of affairs at the Panama Canal in 1887, Mr. Froude has written in the following unmeasured terms[201]:— “If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth century engineering. By the scheme, as it was first propounded, £26,000,000 of English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to form a highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. de Lesseps’ lottery box. Almost all that money, I was told, has been already spent, and only a fifth of the work is done. Meanwhile, the human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers, card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it, of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more deadly by the multitudes of people who crowd thither. Half buried in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they were intended. Unburied altogether lie skeletons