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Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 134, 8 June 1907, Page 2

TOPICAL PORTRAIT SERIES. MR THEODORE SHORTS. AND THE BUILDING OF THE PANAMA CANAL. , <O ' <g

The building or excavating of the Panama Canal is proving a much more formidable task than the Americans ever expected. As a result it has been distinguished so far by the numerous resignations of important officers. When the work started there were three chief directors—Mr Theodore Shorts, President, Mr Charles Magoon, in charge of the political side, and Mr John Wallace, chief engineer. These gentlemen were appointed with a flourish of trumpets, and at enormous salaries, but the engineer resigned at the end of the first six months, and news is just .to hand of the resignation of the president. A good deal of conflicting opinion has characterised the labour question. The main idea at the start was to employ white men only, but from all accounts it is next door to impossible for a white man to labour in the locality and survive a couple of years. An expert in the employ of the United States Government wrote on this question . some-months ago as follows: " Conceive a country lying level within nine degrees of the equator, where the temperature at sea level seldom falls below seventy-eight degrees at night; where in the sun, at noon, an ordinary thermometer will indicate one hundred and forty degrees or more; where it rains'nearly every day for eight months in the year; and where an uninterrupted stream of human traffic from the fever-scourged 1 coasts of"" the South and Central Americas presents a constant danger of infection to tlie inhabitants of an otherwise reasonably wholesome land. In these conditions we find the most definite trouble, which must be met and eradicated before the construction of the canal really can take place. Already the death roll, while not large, contains the names of several Americans who, journeying southward with hope and ambition in their breasts, have come home in hermetically sealed sheets, of lead;- No figures are extant as to the numbers of Chinese who, seated passively in rows, died in their tracks of disease and despair during the^jponstruction of the Panama railroaa. A station on the line, however, called Matachin—which means 'dead Chinaman ' —immortalises the fearful death-rate which must have prevailed. Nor may one learn, from any records, the number of West Indians who were sacrificed in the early exploitation of the Panama Canal. But Frenchmen now upon the Isthmus assert that more than six thousand of their own race have fed the worms and buzzards of that fatal region."

The pridigious task of building the Panama Canal will be grasped in a sense when it is said that it is twice as great as was that of building the Suez Canal. But when we consider the deadliness of the climate, it is aaerhaps impossible to limit tne multiplication of this comparison. Baron Lesseps succeeded at Suez, and failed at Panama, and the Americans have the formidableness of the task in that simple fact. All the same they will succeed, no matter what the cost, and when they have succeeded Panama will alter some of the biggest sea traffic of the world, and incidentally alter the political complexion of "all South America, and, so far as it relates to the East, vary that of the United States. Australia and New Zealand will also Jbe affected, the latter more than.the former, and finally perhaps the Japanese influence in the Pacific Avill be checked by the development of one representing the Stars and Stripes. But it will be a long time ere the Panama Canal is completed, and much, perhaps, will be the tribute which commerce will pay for the gratification of its latest ambition. The resignation of Mr Shorts will not stop the work, of course, but it will mean the appointment of a new man with probably a new set of proposals especially affectnig the labour question, which is the supreme,difficulty.

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