ill. The interpreters who accompanied them declared that much of their

illness was due to their deprivation of their accustomed opium, and for a time the authorities supplied them, with the result that nearly two-thirds were again up and able to work. Then the exaggerated American moral sense, which is so apt to ignore the customs of other lands and peoples, caused the opium supply to be shut off. Perhaps the fact that the cost of opium daily per Chinaman was 15 cents had something to do with it. At any rate the whole body of Chinamen were soon sick unto death and quite ready for it. They made no effort to cling to the lives that had become hateful. Suicides were a daily occurrence and in all forms. Some with Chinese stolidity would sit upon a rock on the ocean’s bed and wait for the tide to submerge them. Many used their own queues as ropes and hanged themselves. Others persuaded or bribed their fellows to shoot them dead. Some thrust sharpened sticks through their throats, or clutching great stones leaped into the river maintaining their hold until death made the grasp still more rigid. Some starved themselves and others died of mere brooding over their dismal state. In a few weeks but 200 were left alive, and these were sent to Jamaica where they were slowly absorbed by the native population. On the line of the old Panama Railroad, now abandoned and submerged by the waters of Gatun Lake, was a village called Matachin, which local etymologists declare means “dead Chinaman,” and hold that it was the scene of this melancholy sacrifice of oriental life.

The railroad builders soon found that the expense of the construction would vastly exceed their estimates. The price of a principality went into the Black Swamp, the road bed through which was practically floated on a monster pontoon. It is not true, as often asserted, that engines were sunk there to make a foundation for the road, but numbers of flat cars were thus employed to furnish a floating foundation. The swamp which impeded the progress of the road was about five miles south of Gatun and was still giving trouble in 1908, when the heavier American rolling stock was put upon the road. Soundings then made indicate that the solid bottom under the ooze is 185 feet below the surface, and somewhere between are the scores of dump cars and the thousands of tons of rock and earth with which the monster has been fed. The Americans conquered it, apparently, in 1908, by building a trestle and filling it with cinders and other light material. But every engineer was glad when in 1912 the relocation of the road abandoned the Black Swamp to its original diabolical devices.

Even in so great an affair as the building of railroads, chance or good fortune plays a considerable part. So it was the hurricane which first drove two ships bearing the California gold seekers from the mouth of the Chagres down to Colon that gave the railroad company just the stimulus necessary to carry it past the lowest ebb in its fortunes. Before that it had no income and could no longer borrow money. Thereafter it had a certain income and its credit was at the very best. Every additional mile finished added to its earnings, for every mile was used since it lessened the river trip to the Pacific. In January, 1855, the last rail was laid, and on the 28th of that month the first train crossed from ocean to ocean. The road had then cost almost $7,000,000 or more than $150,000 a mile, but owing to the peculiar conditions of the time and place it had while building earned $2,125,000 or almost one-third its cost. Its length was 47 miles, its highest point was 263 feet above sea-level, it crossed streams at 170 points--most of the crossings being of the Chagres River. As newly located by the American engineers a great number of these crossings are avoided.

Traffic for the road grew faster than the road itself and when it was completed it was quite apparent that it was not equipped to handle the business that awaited it. Accordingly the managers determined to charge more than the traffic would bear--to fix such rates as would be prohibitive until they could get the road suitably equipped. Mr. Tracy Robinson says that a few of the lesser officials at Panama got up a sort of burlesque rate card and sent it on to the general offices in New York. It charged $25 for one fare across the Isthmus one way, or $10 second class. Personal baggage was charged five cents a pound, express $1.80 a cubic foot, second class freight fifty cents a cubic foot, coal $5 a ton,--all for a haul of forty-seven miles. To the amazement of the Panama jokers the rates were adopted and, what was more amazing, they remained unchanged for twenty years. During that time the company paid dividends of 24%, with an occasional stock dividend and liberal additions to the surplus. Its stock at one time went up to 335 and as in its darkest days it could have been bought for a song. Those who had bought it were more lucky than most of the prospectors who crowded its coaches on the journey to the gold fields.

Too much prosperity brought indifference and lax management and the finances of the road were showing a decided deterioration when the French took up the Canal problem. One of the chief values of the franchise granted by New Granada and afterward renewed by Colombia was the stipulation that no canal should be built in the territory without the consent of the railroad corporation. With this club the directors forced the French to buy them out, and when the rights of the French Canal company passed to the United States we acquired the railroad as well.

It is now Uncle Sam’s first essay in the government ownership and operation of railroads. Extremists declare that his success as a manager is shown by the fact that he takes a passenger from the Atlantic to the Pacific in three hours for $2.40, while the privately owned Pacific railroads take several days and charge about $75 to accomplish the same result. There is a fallacy in this argument somewhere, but there is none in the assertion that by government officials the Panama Railroad is run successfully both from the point of service and of profits. Its net earnings for the fiscal year of 1912 were $1,762,000, of which about five-sixths was from commercial business. But it must be remembered that in that year the road was conducted primarily for the purpose of Canal building--everything was subordinated to the Big Job. That brought it abnormal revenue, and laid upon it abnormal burdens. The record shows however that it was directed with a singular attention to detail and phenomenal success. When passenger trains must be run so as never to interfere with dirt trains, and when dirt trains must be so run that a few score steam-shovels dipping up five cubic yards of broken rock at a mouthful shall never lack for a flat car on which to dump the load, it means some fine work for the traffic manager. The superintendent of schools remarked to me that the question whether a passenger train should stop at a certain station to pick up school children depended on the convenience of certain steam-shovels and that the matter had to be decided by Col. Goethals. Which goes to show that the Colonel’s responsibilities are varied--but of that more anon, as the story-tellers say.

Within a few years forty miles of the Panama Railroad have been relocated, the prime purpose of the change being to obviate the necessity of crossing the Canal at any point. One of the witticisms of the Zone is that the Panama is the only railroad that runs crosswise as well as lengthwise. This jest is partly based on the fact that nine-tenths of the line has been moved to a new location, but more on the practice of picking up every night or two some thousand feet of track in the Canal bed and moving it bodily, ties and all, some feet to a new line. This is made necessary when the steam-shovels have dug out all the rock and dirt that can be reached from the old line, and it is accomplished by machines called track shifters, each of which accomplishes the work of hundreds of men.

The Panama Railroad is today what business men call a going concern. But it is run with a singular indifference to private methods of railroad management. It has a board of directors, but they do little directing. Its shares do not figure in Wall Street, and we do not hear of it floating loans, scaling down debts or engaging in any of the stock-jobbing operations which in late years have resulted in railroad presidents being lawyers rather than railroad men. The United States government came into possession of a railroad and had to run it. Well? The government proved equal to the emergency and perhaps its experience will lead it to get possession of yet other railroads.