For years the plague-stricken Isthmus was abandoned to the negroes and the half-breeds, until in 1849, stimulated by the gold fever of California, a railway was begun by the American engineers, Totten and Trautwine, and completed in 1855, a railway every tie of which cost the life of a man.

The dream of navigators and practical engineers was taken in hand by Ferdinand de Lesseps in January, 1881.

The story of the French Canal Company is a tragedy unparalleled in the history of finance, and, one may add, in the ravages of tropical disease.

Yellow fever, malaria, dysentery, typhus, carried off in nine years nearly twenty thousand employees.

The mortality frequently rose above 100, sometimes to 130, 140 and in September, 1885, it reached the appalling figure of 176.97 per thousand work people.