THE PANAMA FRAUD.

Otago Witness, Issue 2202, 14 May 1896, Page 49

THE PANAMA FRAUD.

Upon the easterly extremity of the Artificial peninsula which was constructed to guard the entrance to the canal from the ktorms of the Caribbean Sea, and to furnish the ephemeral aristocrats of tbe great enterprise with a' select and salubrious dwelling plaoe, stands on a high pedestal a splendid broßz« statue of Columbus. Under his right arm is the half-crouching figure of an Indian girl, who is supposed to be peering out of savagery into civilisation, and looking over what waa to have been the mouth of the Panama Canal 1 Behind the etatue stands what was once the great pleasure house which Ferdinand de Lesseps built for himeelf, and behind it is another, once of equal splendour, built by bis sod, one palace- not being deemed enough for both while the golden stream was flowing in all its fulness. They are built, of course, of wood, and there they stand, rottiDg away in tbe hot, damp climate, a quarter of a million's worth of material, labour, and imported ostentation — monuments to the folly, and worse than folly, that began to build before it had counted the coat. Nearly the whole of this little peninsula, 'which lies between the town of Aspinwall (or Colon) and the canal, is covered by tbe settlement of San Cristobal, which was once like a strip of the Boulevards transported to the tropics, with its streets of broad-roofed, verar.dahed chalets shaded by double rows of emerald-leaved, far-branching palms, glittering all night with hundreds of electric lamp*, and g-iy with the sounds of revelry •which were echoes of the far-away voices of the Place de l'O'pera, the Folies Bergeres, and the Moulin Eouge, only a little more so. Now it is a collection of mouldering wooden houses, ghastly in their snu-bleaohed and rain-soddened ehabbiness, with cracked doors and brokenwindows, for the most part tenantlees, or houslrg only a few negroes or j Chhif>me», and the meanest of mean whites. How much of the subscriptions of the trustful went to build San Cristobal before a yard of tbe canal was dug out may be guessed from the fact that the whole of the curving sea-fronr, along wbioh runs tho palm-shaded carriage driv<^ of gravel and silver sand, over whioh once r olled the imported equipages of contractors, financier?, and " ergineers," is faced with \housands of blocks of concrete piled pell-mell together, every ono of which ' cost from £1 to 253 to throw into its place. To walk through the streets of San Cristobal to-day ought to be enough to biirg a blush to the face of any Frenchman who is not either a journalist or a politician, and yet San Oribtobal is but a very small part of the wilderness of waste and ruin wbioh stretches for 46 miles across the isthmus from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The train starts from the docks at Colon, and runs with great deliberation and rirging of bells up the main street, which look?, as it is, the product of the most bizarre taste and the flimsiest conotruction. The shops are nearly all liquor shopsj in whole or in part, and are filled with perhaps the very worst wet and dry goods that are sold on the face of the earth. In the wild and golden days of the * canal Colon might have been likened to a Wtstern city that bad strayed into thetropioß and gone on a perpetual spree ; but it has bad a revolution and a fire since then, and now it looks as though the spree were over, as it assuredly is md it were snfferiDg from tho inevitable and legitimate results of a prolonged and persistent debauch. While the Frenchmen were amusing themselves in laying out their towns and building their villas on all the prettiest and healthiest situations they could find on the hills across ' the Isthmus, tbe Americans got to work. Allowing only sufficient time for oiling and the necessary inspection of the machinery, they .kept their excavators and dredgers going night and day — trostirg nothir g to the climate or French finance— until they had completed their contract. Then they retired, takicg with, them a profit Of nearly a quarter of a million sterling, and leaving the strip of canal they had excavated to tho incapacity of the French engineers and the tender mercies of the Chagres River in flood time. To-day this piece of canal is a mere Btagoarit ditch, with banks overgrown and utterly hidden by a weed growth, of whose rank luxutiacce no' dweller in temperate zones can form the remotest idea, and lying in the stagnant water, or grounded on tbe ever-growing silt which is fast filling the ditch up again, are dredgers and caissons and excavators brought out from far-distant Frarce at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to rot and rust away un* it they crumble to pieces and sink into tbe alldevouring mud to make pnzz'es for the geolr gists of a future epoch. There are dredgers and excavators which were brought out from France in sections, and put together in poola and backwaters of the Cbagres, and ltft thera to rot and rust without ever excavating a cubic yard of earth. Sometimes the machinery ordered from one fitm would not go into the hull supplied by another, and sometimes the Lull would be some gizss too large for the machinery, and there they lie to this day, having fulfilled the only purpose they were ever intended to serve— th&t of swelling tbe bank accounts of insatiable swindlers who, like flits on decajing canion, fattened on their country's shame. — Pearson's Magazine.