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going on at Panama. Glowing reports came of what was being done, and his fame steadily rose to the climax of heroworship. In 1884 he was elected to the French Academy as the successor of Henri Martin, who had been the successor of Adolphe Thiers, and was saluted by Léon Gambetta with the title of "Le Grand Français," which ever afterward clung to him. On April 23, 1885, he was formally seated among the "Immortals," Victor Hugo being his sponsor and Ernest Renan delivering the oration of welcome.

Behind all this brilliance, the shadows were gathering. In 1885 a serious insurrection occurred on the Isthmus, largely promoted, if not incited, by French intrigues. The city of Colon was looted and burned, and Panama was saved from a like fate only by the intervention of a United States naval force, which went thither under the provisions of the Treaty of 1846. Against this perfectly lawful action of the American Government the French consul bitterly protested, and French sympathy with the insurgents was further shown by the asylum given to the insurgent chief, Aizpuru, on board the French flagship. Two years later came the beginning of the end. Far more money had been spent than the total original estimates, yet the work was scarcely twofifths done. The Congress of 1879 had reckoned a tide-level canal twenty-eight feet deep could be completed for $114,000,000, in seven or eight years. By 1887 it was concluded that a lock canal, only fifteen feet deep, would cost $351,000,000 and would take twenty years to build. The seven construction companies which had been working under contracts withdrew from the field, and in November, 1887, the whole job was turned over to M. Eiffel, the French engineer, who had had the contract for building the locks. Efforts were made to raise more money, which met with little success. Government aid was sought, through the wholesale bribing of Ministers, Senators, and Deputies. A popular petition, signed with 158,000 names, asked for the licensing of a national lottery for the raising of funds. This was granted, but proved ineffectual.

The crash came on December 13, 1888, when the company suspended payments and went into bankruptcy, and on February 4, 1889, was put into the hands of a receiver. The Congress had estimated the cost of the canal at $114,000,000. The company had promised to finish it for $120,000,000. At the end of 1888 the work was scarcely two-fifths done, while nearly $400,000,000 had been disposed of. This colossal sum was said, not altogether untruthfully, to have been one-third spent on the canal, one-third wasted, and onethird stolen. Here are the amounts of the various subscriptions:

This was an appalling showing. It opened the eyes of the world, even of France, to the monstrous futility of the enterprise as it had been conducted. There was no salvation for it in the patronage which the pinchbeck conspirator Boulanger, then in the height of his brief popularity, gave it, in proclaiming himself the protector and promoter of the enterprise, and subscribing for twenty-five of its bonds. The United States Government promptly took advantage of its opportunity to complete the discomfiture of the concern that had flouted and defied it. A few days after the company's suspension of payments, Senator Edmunds proposed a resolution expressing American disapproval of any connection of any European government with any canal across any American Isthmus, which, on January 7, 1889, was

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adopted by an all but unanimous vote. A few weeks later, in February, Congress adopted another resolution, protesting against French control of the Panama Canal, and appropriating $250,000 to be used by the President in the protection of American rights and interests on that Isthmus. On February 7, the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua, an American organisation, chiefly of New York capitalists, was incorporated by act of Congress.

The remaining history of the De Lesseps enterprise, partly pathetic, partly tragic, and wholly unsavoury and disgraceful, may be briefly dismissed. Humanity forbids us long to dwell upon such a theme. Judicial proceedings and Parliamentary investigations and trials were conducted at Paris in 1892-93, and there was disclosed to the horrified world such an orgy of corruption as history had never before recorded. A hundred Senators and Deputies were accused of having taken bribes. The Ministry and the Police department were under the same charge. Ten Senators and Deputies, including five former Ministers, were brought to trial, together with the Directors of the Company. Baron Jacques Reinach, the financial agent of the company, who had done much of the bribing, committed suicide. Arton, a banker, who had been associated with him in the dirty work, fled into exile, and long afterward, in 1905, also killed himself. Cornelius Herz, the third member of the triumvirate of corruption, went to England, and either fell or pretended to fall ill, so that he could not be extradited, and thus spent the rest of his life. Ferdinand de Lesseps collapsed, physically and mentally, and probably never fully realised what had happened or what afterward happened. On January 10, 1893, these sentences were pronounced: Ferdinand de Lesseps, five years' imprisonment and $600 fine, and his son, Charles de Lesseps, the same; Baron Cottu, and Marius Fontane, each two years' imprisonment and $600 fine; M. Eiffel, two years' imprisonment, and $4,000 fine. The sentence against the elder De Lesseps was never executed, and that against his son was annulled by the Court of Appeals. The

judgment of the world was that both Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps had been accused and condemned without cause, and that they were guiltless of the iniquities which had been perpetrated in their names. Ferdinand de Lesseps died on December 7, 1894, without ever rallying from his prostration, and his fame will be immortal despite the melancholy ending of his career.

In the United States it became clear that extravagant sums of money had been used in secret if not illicit measures to promote the interests of Panama and to hamper and defeat the rival enterprise at Nicaragua. It was proved that combinations for trade monopoly had been formed by the Panama railroad, then owned by the French canal company, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and certain transcontinental railroads; all of which strengthened the resolution to enforce the established principle of an American canal under American control. The De Lesseps scheme had been conceived and elaborated in defiance and denial of that principle, and in its hopeless collapse it left that principle triumphant above all danger of future challenge.