"The Path Between the Seas"

[fiefoe]

The aftermath:

• Bunau-Varilla 's last ditch proposal: He wanted to make one kind of canal in order to dig another kind. . build a lock canal upon which to float the dredges and let the dredges eventually transform that canal into an uninterrupted passage at sea level. He would use water, rather than railroad track, to transport his excavation machinery, and to carry the spoil away.
• More important, there was the growing belief that finance capitalism had become a conspiracy, that the country was in the grip of the financiers.
• In the less than four months since Edouard Drumont commenced his disclosures in _La Libre Parole, a government had fallen; three former premiers had been named in the plot, along with two former minsters and two prominent senators; more than a hundreds deputies or former deputies stood accused of taking payoffs;
• (Charles de Lesseps's defense:) Everybody had wanted a cut. The company had been told to pay for political support, for influence on the Bourse, for the willingness not to discredit its claims - or face the consequences.
• No less than 2,575 different French newspaper and periodicals had shared in the company's beneficence. Some little fly-by-night publications had even been founded for the sole purpose of getting in on the take.. (including Bee-keeper's Journal and the Choral Societies Echo.)
• Gustave Eiffel..'s career as a builder was finished; he would thereafter apply himself to wholly different work in meteorology and aerodynamics.
• (The French venture) had cost about $287 million - far more than ever before been spent on any one peaceful undertaking of any kind.
• The surge of anti-Semitism that Edouard Drumont unleashed was soon to spill over into the appalling Dreyfus Affair.

The author's analysis of de Lesseps is quite convincing:

• It could be as readily argued that his curse was the failure to decline... Again and again things could have gone differently, more prudent or realistic views might have prevailed, had he been incapable any longer of playing on his powers - to charm, to flatter, to inspire, to sweep good men onward, contrary to their better instincts, using nothing but the phenomenal force of personality.
• As he himself once said, he enjoyed "the privilege of being believed without having to prove what one affirms."
• His was the faith that mountains could be moved by technology. He was as much bedazzled by the momentum of progress as by his own past triumph.  .. He had the nonscientific, nontechical man's faith that science and technology would "find a way."

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