PANAMA CANAL.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 13575, 6 December 1907, Page 2

PANAMA CANAL.

PROGRESS OF A GREAT WORK. There are 43,000 men working on the Panama Canal, and the Americans are goinjfto "see it through." They are excavating now at the rate of 1,517,412 Cubic yards a month — that was the September total— and the army of workers has Been infected with something of the Izeal and energy of the supervising engineers. The September figures were one-sixth better than those for August, and when President Roosevelt was speaking at St. Louis he said that if the August rate could be maintained, the actual digging of, the canal could be completed in five or six years'. The engineers are convinced that they can improve even upon, the September rate, but when they get into difficult ground the average will be reduced. There are no very confident prophecies as to when the canal will be completed, because the time occupied really depends upon the speed with which the great Gatun dam and the necessary locks can be constructed. The conditions under which the work is carried on are improving every month. The chief trouble at present is with the drinking water. When Mr Poulteney Bigelow visited Panama he paid a high tribute to the work of the medical men and engineers in the department of sanitation, and now and then a tribute comes from an investigator who went frankly to criticise. The "Civic Federation" is one of the progressive societies that endeavour to keep Governments and municipalities up to tho mark in the United States. It sent Miss Gertrude Becks, one of its secretaries, to Panama for five weeks to ascertain how the workers were beingtreated, and Miss Beoks has' returned to New York full of praise for the administration. She says that the drinking water at Colon is undoubtedly bad. "There are too many eggs for breakfast, and they are too mature," she reports. "There are too many domestic insects of all the more obnoxious varieties, and too much damp idothing and bedding. Tips, to waiters -are. also objectionably prevalent, ,\Pn the other hand, the hospitals ape/ sjsle,ndidly.f equipped, and you can geVjjaJl. tha, quinine^ you want at every ,ni,eal..» Thepre are many manufacturing villages in, the United States not ha,^, so beautiful ,as the homes for American families and the bachelors' dormitories furnished by the Government at Panama, though perhaps that is not saying so very much after all." The conditions altogether "have changed almost miraculously within the last two years."