Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/184

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
164
Panama Past and Present

anthem. It was a popular tune of the period, called "Mr. Dooley"!

Sewers were laid at the same time as the water-pipes, and the big clumsy cobblestones were ground up in portable rock-crushers to make a concrete bed for the smooth new pavements of vitrified brick. Formerly, garbage of all sorts was thrown out into the streets to rot there or be eaten by the hundreds of vultures that were the only

THE OLD WATER DEPARTMENT OF PANAMA.

street-cleaning department. But now the streets are swept every night by gangs of negroes, employed by the Panamanian Government, under American supervision.

In sanitation as in politics, we found Panama a city of the Middle Ages. Our doctors discovered a few wretched lunatics chained to the damp walls of the seventeenth-century dungeons, hewn out of the rock beneath the sea-wall; and lepers, who lived on the beach outside the city wall, and dared not come too near, lest people call out, "Unclean! Unclean!" and stone them, exactly as they did in Old Testament times. Though these un-