Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor
will be submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth
of the tropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels,
and palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will
seem almost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in
their deck chairs will gaze about them and snort:
"Huh! Is that all we got for nine years' work and half a billion
dollars?" They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and
Colon, forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and
graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the
furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not
recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little
items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on
the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so
essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a
trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is
the accomplishment of the United States in showing the natives how
life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet
the lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal
builder will return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the
native will sink back into just what he would have been had we
never come.
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