Across this barrier in '49 clambered the American argonauts, seeking the newly discovered golden fleeces of California.
This was the theater of the failure of Count de Lesseps, the most stupendous financial fiasco in the history of the world.
And this, now, is the site of the most expensive and most successful engineering project ever undertaken by human beings.
It cost the French $300,000,000 to fail at Panama where the Americans, at the expenditure of $375,000,000, succeeded. And, of the excavation done by the French, only $30,000,000 worth was available for the purpose of the Americans. That the Americans succeeded where the French had failed is not to be assigned to the superiority of the American over the French nation. The reasons are to be sought, rather, in the underlying purposes of the two undertakings, and in the scientific and engineering progress made in the double decade intervening between the time when the French failure became apparent and the Americans began their work.
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.