straw, but almost without clay. Instead of realizing that millions of dollars' worth of machinery must be bought, the dirt and disease of four centuries scrubbed away, and a great army of men enlisted, drilled, housed, and fed, Congress could think of nothing but the danger of another scandal like that of the de Lesseps Company, and
CROSS-SECTION OF THE ISTHMUS ON CANAL ROUTE.
so doled out money in grudging driblets, while the American people kept crying, "Make the dirt fly!" with the same thoughtless impatience with which the people of the North cried, "On to Richmond!" before Bull Run. The Walker Commission gave it up in the spring of 1905.
The second Isthmian Canal Commission had for a chairman Mr. Theodore P. Shonts, a railroad president; but most of the active work was left to the Chief Engineer, Mr. John L. Stevens. To his skill as a practical, self-taught railroad-builder is due the scientific, labor-saving arrangement of the hundreds of miles of construction tracks over which the dirt-trains run to the dumps. Under Mr. Stevens—"Big Smoke Stevens" they called him, for he burned up cigars like Grant in the Wilderness—the record for a month's excavation was brought up to a million cubic yards, the type of canal was finally settled on, and General Gorgas finished his fight against
