VISCOUNT FEEDINAND DE LESSEES. 381 



American purchaser of a share. Yet these shares are worth now 

 many times their original face value, and we, indirectly or through 

 foreign sliips, are among the best customers. The Report for last 

 year shows that of the three thousand three hundred and fifty-two 

 ships that passed through the canal (averaging considerably over two 

 thousand tons each) England sent two thousand three hundred and 

 eighty-six and the United States only five. 



Since the days of the Conquistadors, the project for a canal through 

 the American isthmus had been an alternative to the shorter route to 

 the Indies by way of Suez, to be considered in case physical or politi- 

 cal difiiculties should intervene. The completion of the Suez Canal 

 and the guaranty that British control gave it, reduced very much the 

 commercial demand for the westward route. Nevertheless, the immense 

 revenue at Suez excited the popular mind, especially in France, with 

 the hope of a great speculation in the establishment of a rival company, 

 which, while sharing in some measure the overflowing trade of India 

 and China, might secure the interchanges between the two coasts of 

 America, and perhaps the whole of our trade with Japan. 



The Panama project was high born and burst into life a full grown 

 scheme. There were no prime ministers, emperors, and sublime portes 

 lying in wait to stifle it. With Count de Lesseps for its godfather 

 holding the lamp of Aladdin, all the world attended its baptism with 

 complacent expression, — except, perhaps, that the Monroe Doctrine 

 cast a sinister shadow over the scene, — a very thin shadow, but 

 enough to depress the market for the securities after the first rush was 

 over. But what the scheme lacked from first to last was justification 

 in immediate necessity. It had an illegitimate and premature birth, 

 and its sponsors limited their risks to broker's charges, — exce^at M. 

 de Lesseps, who gave all. He gave his past earnings in the best ser- 

 vice of our age, and he gave his fair fame as endowment enough for 

 the whole credit of the company — at the start. 



Professor Nourse and other clever writers have said that the 

 American canal would be of greater benefit than the Egyptian, be- 

 cause it would connect greater oceans, and that commerce demands a 

 navigable zone around the world. Half in sympathy with these ideas, 

 we cannot help thinking that in this aphoristic form they lack practical 

 merit. Man does not inhabit the sea, and the road that traverses 

 or connects intimately the most inhabited portions of the earth must be 

 the most valuable. Our system of overland railways to the Pacific is 

 practically a supplement to the Suez Canal in the all around commerce 

 of the world, and it was the building of this system with its counec- 



