The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

The triumphs of the engineers—their engineers—were real; the task was better than half finished—“the efforts actually put forth may be considered as more than half the total efforts necessary” was his exact claim and a total fiction. (Only about a tenth of the canal had been dug, as the American officer Kimball rightly judged.) The completion date, he also said, was being deferred somewhat and the original cost estimate of 1,200,000,000 francs, as set by the Paris congress, was being adopted. But such announcements went unchallenged. Nobody questioned or protested anything he said. When a man called for a formal investigation of the company’s management, there was no one in the entire hall who would even second the motion. Not until later that summer did the talk of failure begin to sound serious. Writing in the Économiste Français on August 8, the highly regarded financial editor Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, known to be an old friend of de Lesseps’, warned that unless the canal company was reorganized, “we shall see the most terrible financial disaster of the nineteenth century.” The New York Tribune, among other foreign papers, began calling the canal a “gigantic wild-cat speculation” and lamented that the poor innocent stockholders were unable to go out and see the truth for themselves.