plete plans, with the cost of construction figured out to within ten per cent, for a sea-level canal between the two cities. After a little more work on the Isthmus, next year, Wyse obtained a concession from the government
COLOMBIA NATIONAL FLAG.
at Bogotá, granting the exclusive right to build an interoceanic canal, not only at Panama, but anywhere else through the territory of the United States of Colombia, as New Granada was then called. When we remember the thorough preliminary surveys made for the Panama Railroad by Stephens and Hughes and Baldwin, it seems incredible that the French people should have taken Wyse seriously, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in an enterprise of which they knew so little. What blinded them was the name of the man who now came forward as the head of that enterprise, Ferdinand de Lesseps.
He was "the great Frenchman," the most popular and honored man in France, because of the glory he had won her by the construction of the Suez Canal. Sent on a diplomatic mission to Egypt, de Lesseps, though not a trained engineer, had recognized the ease with which a ship canal could be cut through the hundred miles of level sand that separated the Mediterranean from the Red Sea. It took both imagination and courage to conceive a ship canal of that length, and the greatest difficulty, as with every new thing, lay in persuading people that it would not necessarily be a failure, because there had never been anything just like it before. The actual digging was as simple as making the moat round a sand
