The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-04-27
AFFAIRS AT PANAMA.

Is 1t CT 1pletely and absolutely m- possible to get the truth from the Panama canal Zone? Reports irom I down there are so directly conflicting 1 that we arc compelled to decide thaL some of them are absolutely untrust- worthy. There Is Chairman Snonts' who has been down there looking over the situation, and comes back Wien l brilliant statements of what Is oeins 1 done and going to be done. He teiis | us that there are 23,000 laborers at l work and that they dug out 24o.oVo | cubic yards of dirt during the mohth l of March. A little calculation snows | that each one of these laborers actual ly dug out about ten cubic yards or | dirt in a month! This is slightly more than one cubic foot of dirt in a day. A child with his little spade and tin bucket would do much better than l that.
 | Taking the statement of Engineer Wallace. that a lock canal will require | the removal of one hundred million cubic yards of earth and rock. it will he seen that it would take at least | thirty-five years to do the digging. recent letter from Hon. John Bigelow' printed in The New York Sun, says at the present rate of progress 1t Will | take at least forty years to do the excayating and removing earth and rock for a sea-level canal MT. Shonts tells us that by July or August they will be prepared to dig more than twice as fast as they now do. He dS~~ not say, what anybody can see, that as they go further into the cut it will become more and more expensive ana I tedious to remove and carry off the material as it is excavated. nor does he mention the other obvious fact that as the work proceeds .4e engineers and laborers are likely to encounter unseen obstacles which will delay their pro- sress Making the best we can or the Shonts report we can reach no other conclusion than that 1t will require at least a generation to do the digging which is a long way from the whole work to be done.
 But there is another great discrep- ancy in the reports It Is well known that one of the grave problems has been to get an adequate water sup ply at Colon. Leaving out the state ments of Poultney Bigelow. who prop ably told more truth than he has been | given credit for, we know from other sources that the water is scarce and had. Some time ago Secretary Taft made the positive statement that up- l haf a. pared at Colon and that by the first of April a billion-gallon reservoir would be ready with good water for all purposes. The Washington Post. generally conservative newspaper, printed a statement from its corres- pondent of the conditions as he found them on March 31 According to his statement this magnificent water bas- in consisted of valley overgrown with luxuriant vegetation, at one end
 of which lay pile of logs and rub
 bish called by courtesy dam, and
 through the centre of which flowed
 slu. sh stream"
 That is the great reservoir of which MT. Taft spoke so confidently! But MT.
 
 tells of the great reservoirs that have
 been created" as he expresses 1t, hay
 ing an enormous capacity, one of them
 being at Colon with a capacity of
 $50, 100000 gallons, yet that reservoir
 had become so depleted-if 1t ever ex-
 isted-that they have been hauling wa
 ter from other sourcs for daily con- sumption. As The Philadelphia Rec ord sees the conditions 1t all comes to this: That a reservoir holding less than a quarter of one per cent. of its estimated capacity may be regarded as having been "created' only in the off, cial sense of the word. The sluggish stream seen by The Posts correspon- dent probably contained all of the 1.500, 900 gallons alluded to by MT, shonts, and the official reports con- corning the Colon water works are dis ingenious efforts to conceal the facts
 This matter of digging as reported bv shonts, and his report of the water supply, are two instances of glowing statements unsupported by facts, and may evidently be taken as fair speci- mems of canal congregations, And by the way. we notice that The New York Times thus jolts the President:
 For nearly four years President Roosevelt has had absolute authority on June 2S, 1902, that the so-called Spooner act authorizing the President to conclude the negotiations with the Frenchmen, and, having concluded mem. to construct the canal was en- acted. At the expiration of period ) nearly equivalent to full term of t the | are stnl chiefly made up of statements } ahout sanitation, the construction of the laborers' dwellings. the progress oi z water-supply work, and the extension
 of railroad tracks into the cut as d
 preparation for digging. Incidentally
 we do hear of digging-240,OOO cubic 5 yards in March, for instance.
 5 In the meantime Congress and the engineers are haggllng and dlsputlne g