The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

His was not “the faith that could move mountains,” as was written or said by so many who never troubled to look at what he had been saying repeatedly since the Paris congress. Not at all. His was the faith that the mountains could be moved by technology. He was as much bedazzled by the momentum of progress as by his own past triumph. “Science has declared that the canal is possible, and I am the servant of science,” he had remarked at the Delmonico’s dinner in 1880. Wondrous new machines would save the day, he told his stockholders again and again. Men of genius would come forth, by which he meant technicians and scientists—workers in physics, mathematics, soil engineering, chemistry, tropical medicine, hydraulics—things about which he knew little or nothing, but which he counted on. He had the nonscientific, nontechnical man’s faith that science and technology would “find a way.”