THE PANAMA CANAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13355, 8 December 1906, Page 4

THE PANAMA CANAL.

The Sydney Morning Herald's New York correspondent, writing under date October 20, with reference to the Panama Canal, says:—The Government has at last confessed that if i? unequal to the task of building the Panama Canal, and the work is to be-given out under open bidding to contractors. This ie gall and wormwood to all who favour the expansion of official activity, and especially to the friends of municipal ownership. As usual, the question at issue plainly has two sides. The contractors will, no doubt, hire Chinese coolies, and will get even from coolies the very last stroke of work ; and it may thus quite possibly become true of the Panama Canal, as it certainly was true of the Panama railroad, that every footand some people even said every inch—of progress cost a human life. That will mean reflected reproach and humiliation to the contractors' principals. But to build the canal with eight-hour day, high-priced, organised labour would mean a trebling of the cost, and the imposition, directly upon American farmers and indirectly upon the world's commerce, of a burden not to be endured. In three out of every four Congressional districts no candidate on either side could safely champion either the extreme view of the claims of labour or the extreme view of the rights of capital; indeed, as to hardly anything else is the old proverb truer—the middle path is the safest. Still, the final decision of the Government shows which scale, just at present is the heavier in the balance.