The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

It was both the crowning constructive effort, “The Great Enterprise,” of the Victorian Era and the first grandiose and assertive show of American power at the dawn of the new century.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, who had fought under Lafayette at Yorktown, then, back in France, founded his own radical philosophy aimed toward a new global order. It was he who wrote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

President Grant’s Interoceanic Canal Commission. Having weighed the results of its surveys in Central America, the commission had decided in favor of Nicaragua. The decision was unanimous. Panama received little more than passing mention.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. —VICTOR HUGO

Virtually all of de Lesseps’ blind spots, all the tragic errors of his way, had shown themselves in the course of the two weeks—the jaunty disregard of technical problems, the inability to heed, to trust, the views of recognized authorities if those views conflicted with his own, the faith that the future would take care of itself, that necessity would give rise to invention in required proportions and at the proper moment, the unshakable faith in his own infallibility.

And he had every intention of exercising power as it had not been in a very long time. “I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power,” he would write, “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”

To him, first, last, and always, the canal was the vital—the indispensable—path to a global destiny for the United States of America.