Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/221

 202 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS Goethals went to Panama. In the first place Boosevelt made GoethaJs the autocrat of the Isthmus. A leader educated by the Nation, paid by the Nation, without hope of preferment save through the service of the Nation, was placed in charge. He could be trusted, and if he did not do well he could be im- mediately recalled and another trained man was ready to take his place. It is, indeed, Goethals 's firm belief that the only way to do public work satisfactorily is to place full power in the hands of one man. He does not believe in commissionB; for if there is no man in the conmiission strong enough to dominate it, then it is dominated by the doubters ; and where there is doubt, nothing can be done. And if there is a strong man, then why the conmiission? Roosevelt also insisted that every man on the commission should live on the Canal Zone — in short, be on the job. Of the first Panama Conunission only one man lived on the Isthmus permanently; of the second commission, only two men. But every man of the present conunission lives where, every day of the year, he can hear the sound of the driUs or the squealing of the donkey engines. As for Goethals him- self, his office and his home are almost on the brink of the hill above Culebra Cut, the heart and center of the great work. From his office window one can look down into the bottom of the cut where the steam shovels are rooting, day and night, into the red slides from Cucurache Hill. While the working force was not demoralized when Goe- thals went to Panama — for Stevens had done much in lick- ing it into form — it can be said with truth that it had never been soundly moralized. There had been so many changes of engineers and conunis- sioners, such backing and filling as to policies, that no strong guiding purpose can be said to have existed and the workers were in a constant state of unrest. The rank and file, how- ever, were strongly attached to Stevens, yielding that loyalty to a strong man which they had not yet been inspired to give to the idea. Though brusque and even rough in many of his methods of dealing with labor, Stevens had that magnetism of personal-