The Lyttelton Times. FRIDAY, DEC. 21, 1888.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXX, Issue 8671, 21 December 1888, Page 5

The Lyttelton Times. FRIDAY, DEC. 21, 1888 .

We do not wonder that the prospect of a collapse of the Panama Canal Company has shaken not only Paris, but Prance from end to end. In the first place, the gigantic undertaking was eminently a national concern. It sprang from the brain of French engineers; its arrangements were begun and carried on in Prance from first to last; it was endorsed by French financiers and fathered by the French Government; it was to be one of the mightiest achievements of French genius and perseverance, something to throw into the shade even that wonderful feat on the Suez Isthmus, to which every Frenchman of our time points with justifiable pride; lastly, the Panama Canal was to be made with French capital, and in so far as it has been made at all French gold has made it. Not less than forty millions sterling have now been sunk in this huge enterprise. Of course immense sums out of this have been expended in France in financing loans, in salaries, in payment for machinery, in advertising and bribing, and in twenty different ways. All this money is in France now, and nothing can lose it for the nation. But millions have actually been laid out in the Isthmus itself, and a cessation of work means a total loss of these not only to the unhappy shareholders and their creditors, but to France. When the present Canal project was mootedeight years ago, De Lesseps estimated its cost at twenty-eight million sterling. By 1885 twenty millions had been spent, and not more than one-fifth of the excavation had been completed. In that year De Lesseps had to face a storm of hostile criticism, chiefly from America. He faced it, and did not lose the confidence either of his shareholders or of the great army of French investors. The Americans, indeed, had looked more than coldly on his project from the first. Several well-3mown Americans, among them Mr Cyrus Field, attended the “ Congress ” assembled in Paris in 1879, by De Lesseps, to discuss his project, but they all declined to vote, and from that time his Canal has been furiously assailed by all sections of the American Press, The New York Tribune and Times for instance, though they agree on almost nothing else in the universe, find time even in the throes of a Presidential election to unite in predicting the speedy ruin of the Universal and Inter-oceanic Canal Company. To return to 1885. De Lesseps was able to satisfy his friends that a large amount of the twenty millions already sunk had been put into machinery and other preliminary expenses. He therefore argued that the proportion of expenditure on the remaining four-fifths of the canal would bear no comparison with that already incurred. There was much justice in this as those who remembered the story of the Suez Canal saw. Authority was therefore given to borrow twenty-four millions more, and the money was 1 ' raised* though not without heavy sacrifices. France, however, had taken the and did not desert her champion. few. hundred^

thousand small investors, chiefly peasant proprietors, have put their savings into” the Company’s bonds. We need not wonder that the failure of the last loan has well-nigh brought about a riot in Paris. Having got his money in 1885, the great engineer went on his way triumphantly, predicting that in 1889 the Canal would be opened. In a few days more 1889 will have come, and nothing is opened. On the contrary, something has been shut—the doors of the Company’s office in Paris. In 1886 an attempt was made to place some of the Company’s stock in London: it failed utterly. A year ago Dp Lesseps came to his last card; he appealed to the French Government for permission to raise money by means of a lottery. At first permission was refused, but the pressure brought to bear was too great, and the refusal was revoked. By the sale of lottery bonds nominally worth .£l6 apiece at £l4 8s apiece, between eleven and twelve million sterling were raised. That was only a few months ago. Yet in October De Lesseps had to make up his mind to sell another two hundred thousand of these bonds, nominally worth £3,200,000. The reason for this fresh demand for money following so soon pa the hpels of the preceding loan seems to have been that most of the money then got had been forestalled, or was sacrificed in financing, or had to be deposited as security for the bondholders and prize-winners. Thus it was calculated that not more than £2,750,000 remained available for canal work. The annual interest, charges, and administration expenses of the Company are said to exceed £4.000,000.

Between the puffing of French, and the furious denouncing of American newspapers, the truth about the state q£ the Canal is not easy to determine. Mr Fronde, in his booh on the West Indies, takes the pessimist view of it, and sums up his opinion thus vigorously[:—-*• In all the world there is not now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, sp much foul disorder, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenthcentury engineering.” But, then, Mr Fronde is not precisely the person in whose financial estimates our readers would place implicit trjist. He may have thundered against the Canal because he knew all he said was true beyond a doubt, or because it was an undertaking of this hateful, democratic nineteenth century, and because somebody had told mm it was a swindle. We have, however, before us a description of the isthmus written only ten weeks ago, which takes almost as gloomy a view of the Canal as Mr Froude. The writer-rafter enlarging on the old topics of the pestilential and dismal climate; the reckless immorality of the towns, with their poisonous grog-shanties and miasmatic mud-holes; upon the spectacle of valuable machinery, lying rusting in the tropical rain, and upon all the other mournful sights of which we have heard po> often—goes on to say that except at the huge Culebra cutting he found very little work going on. There the Engineers are trying to cut away a mountain, and have not yet succeeded. They pile the wet, soapy earth in huge embankments by their canal. Then the deluge comes down from the heavens, and in a night the earth is washed back into their excavations. The attempt to scoop out the bed of the Chagres has already, he says, cost fifty millions sterling, and is not yet successful. When he asked the Superintendent of Works whether the canal would be open in 1889 the man smiled. It is only fair to add that the writer is an American. But whatever doubts there may he about tbe actual state of things at Panama, it is clear enough that the Company has put up its shutters in Paris, and that an attempt by the Government to save it has been thwarted by the Chamber of Deputies. De Lesseps has had many wonderful escapes. If he survive this peril he will have performed almost as marvellous a feat as the uniting of the Atlantic and Pacific.