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 oi 

 the South, Mr. Claude N. Bennett 

 more clearly fixed the attention of the 

 country upon the assured succes- of 

 this great waterway than ha- been done 

 by any other recent deliverance upon 

 this live subject. He showed intimate 

 knowledge of the detail-, a- well a- the 

 broad principle- of the entire ta-k. He 

 demonstrated rare capaciu to put hi- 

 information into concrete- form and to 

 tell his audience ju-t the things that 

 thev most wanteil 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 -pent in the Canal Zone wa- too 

 short a period to satisfy the interest 

 which the great work there had aroused 

 in him. Mr. llennett entered into the 

 subject-matter of his lecture. The 

 Canal Zone, he -aid, is to-day the 

 bu-iest place on the ma]). 



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 incalculable 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 tw > : think of the 

 building of the < iatun Dam. the great- 

 e-t 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 arou-ed the nations of the world to 

 wonder. 

 506 



All this was to be done 2,000 miles 

 from the ha-e 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 J.ooo mile- of -ea all the 

 labor, all the lumber to build the house-, 

 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 \tlantic with the water- of the 

 Pacific, had been the dream of natioii- 

 for centuries. The French, under Ferdi- 

 nand 'le Lesscp-. were the first to make 

 a definite attempt, but even that great 

 ngineer, the creator of the 1 Sue/. Canal 

 had underestimated the tremendou- 

 difficulties of the enterprise, and 

 after years of labor, after the expendi- 

 ture of many millions of money and the 

 -acrifice of many thousands of lives, 

 thev had to write failure across their 

 plans. It wa- reserved for the United 

 State- to take up the gigantic task, and 

 the Government of the Tinted States 

 in the brief space of four years has 

 wrought the miracle for which th' 

 world waited for centuries. Not that it 

 is finished, for the real work has just 

 reached its middle stage. Tlu- L'nited 

 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- 

 try, and this in itself was a task so great 



