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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 5170, 15 March 1888, Page 2

This is how Mr Fronde, i;i his last book, "The English in tho West Indies," speaks of the Panama Canal: —" In all the world there is not now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disorder, such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in tho scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth century engineering. By the scheme as it was first propounded _ix-and-twunty millions in Enj.-li.li money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a highway for the commerce of tho globe, and enricli with untold wealth the happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were tempted by the golden bait, aud poured forth their savings into M. do Lesseps' lottery box. Almost all that money, I was told, has been speut, and only a fifth of the work is done. Meanwhile the human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators. adventurers, card-sharpers, hell keepers, aud doubtful ladies have carried their charms to the delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, iMid centipedes; tho 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 hither. Half buried in the mud lie about tho wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent, out under lavish ordeiS and found unfit for the work for which they were intended. Unburied altogether li_ also the skeletons of the human machines which have broken down there, picked clean by tho vultures. Everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly am! loathsome stems to be gathered into that locality just now.''