two hundred and fifty thousand a year, with the additional obligation of extending the railroad to the islands in the Bay of Panama.
Two years later came the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad, and the loss of the California trade. But far more important than this was the traffic with the west coast of South and Central America, carried almost entirely by the ships of a British corporation, the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. The incredible stupidity of the Panama Railroad's directors forced this company to abandon its shops and dockyards on the Island of Taboga, in the Bay of Panama, and send its ships direct to England through the Straits of Magellan. Too late they saw that most of the trade went with them.
So, like Spain, the Panama Railroad built a trade-route across the Isthmus, monopolized it, flourished, and decayed. Its once-prized stock became the football of Wall Street speculators, its tracks the traditional "two streaks of rust." But unlike Spain's, its star was to rise again.
