THE NATION'S HERCULEAN TASK 



Synopsis of a Lecture on the Panama Canal Delivered by CLAUDE N, BENNETT, Manager of 

 Congressional Information Bureau, Washington, D. C, before the Summer School of the South 

 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville 



IN HIS lecture on the Panama 

 Canal before the Summer School of 

 the South, Mr. Claude N. Bennett 

 more clearly fixed the attention of the 

 country upon the assured success of 

 this great waterway than has been done 

 by any other recent deliverance upon 

 this live subject. He showed intimate 

 knowledge of the details, as well as the 

 broad principles of the entire task. He 

 demonstrated rare capacity to put his 

 information into concrete form and to 

 tell his audience just the things that 

 they most wanted to know. His state- 

 ments have been copied with favorable 

 comment all over the country. 



After a brief introduction, in which 

 he said that even the whole month which 

 he had spent in the Canal Zone was too 

 short a period to satisfy the interest 

 which the great work there had aroused 

 in him. Mr. Bennett entered into the 

 subject-matter of his lecture. The 

 Canal Zone, he said, is to-day the 

 busiest place on the map. 



Think what the proposition is — cutting 

 a canal through fifty miles of hills and 

 rocks, actually levelling mountains, to 

 unite two great oceans ; think of the al- 

 most incalcvdable amount of excavation, 

 the figures to express which well nigh 

 stagger the arithmatician ; think of the 

 accessories to be taken into considera- 

 tion in this tremendous undertaking of 

 cutting a continent in two ; think of the 

 building of the Gatun Dam. the great- 

 est dam the world will know ; think of 

 the immense locks, each 1,400 feet in 

 length, and you may possibly form an 

 approximate idea of an enterprise which 

 has aroused the nations of the world to 

 wonder. 

 S06 



All this was to be done 2,cxx) miles 

 from the base of supplies, in a tropical 

 country choked up with the densest 

 vegetable growth, a veritable death- 

 trap of fever, malaria, and all manner 

 of tropical diseases. They had to trans- 

 port across 2,000 miles of sea all the 

 labor, all the lumber to build the houses, 

 all the supplies to feed an army of 

 30,000 men. all the machinery to oper- 

 ate with, from a pick to a track-throw- 

 ing machine. 



The building of an Isthmian Canal, a 

 waterway that would unite the waters 

 of the Atlantic with the waters of the 

 Pacific, had been the dream of nations 

 for centuries. The French, under Ferdi- 

 nand de Lesseps, were the first to make 

 a definite attempt, but even that great 

 engineer, the creator of the Suez Canal 

 had underestimated the tremendous 

 difiiculties of the enterprise, and 

 after years of labor, after the expendi- 

 ture of many millions of money and the 

 sacrifice of many thousands of lives, 

 they had to write failure across their 

 plans. It was reserved for the United 

 States to take up the gigantic task, and 

 the Government of the United States 

 in the brief space of four years has 

 wrought the miracle for which the 

 world waited for centuries. Not that it 

 is finished, for the real work has just 

 reached its middle stage. The United 

 States officials realized that the first 

 thing to do was to make the Isthmus 

 of Panama a place where white men, 

 not natives of the tropical zone, and not 

 inured to that climate, might live. 

 Hence the first thing they undertook 

 was the sanitation of that strip of coun- 

 trv, and this in itself was a task so p-reat 



