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 Rh in the word of the "great Frenchman" hundreds of thousands of his countrymen invested their savings in the worthless stock of the Canal Company. But the only persons who made any money out of the enterprise were the swindlers and speculators who used the deluded old man's honored name as a bait for other people's money. De Lesseps himself was honest, but so blinded by the memory of his past success that he could see nothing in Panama but another Suez.

Thousands of laborers and millions of dollars' worth of machinery were sent to the Isthmus, before the slightest preparation had been made to receive them. The Panama Railroad refused to carry these men and materials except as ordinary passengers and freight, at its own high rates. This soon forced the French Canal Company to buy the railroad, paying for it, including termini, $25,000,000, or more than three times what it cost to build it. The organization and management of the road, however, still remained American.

This lack of foresight was the first great cause of the French failure, and the second was disease. From the beginning, yellow fever and malaria broke out in every labor camp, and attacked almost every engineer and workman, killing hundreds, and demoralizing the rest. At that time, no one knew how to prevent these diseases, but the French tried their best to cure those that fell sick. They built two splendid hospitals, one on terraces laid out on the side of Ancon Hill, overlooking the city of Panama, and the other on piles out over the water of Limon Bay at Colon. In these hospitals, the feet of the cots were placed in little pans of water to keep ants