Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/256

236 then. So much for the military side; now for the commercial.

A model town of concrete houses is to be built at Balboa for the operating force. Here will be the offices of the permanent Canal headquarters, and barracks for a battalion of marines, who may be needed to keep drunken stevedores and sailors from breaking up the toy police force of Panama City. An anchorage basin is being dredged and lined with an elaborate system of concrete docks, and the hundreds of acres of new land that have been made by filling in tidal swamps with earth and rock from Gaillard Cut will some day be covered with warehouses, that should pay a very profitable rental to Uncle Sam. Electricity for lighting the streets, heating the electric stoves in the houses, and operating the cargo-cranes and other machinery, will be supplied by the spillway power-plant at Gatun (see page 174). Here at Balboa will be concentrated the present machine-shops, the commissary with its cold-storage plant and bakery, and the Government laundry, which now plans to take the soiled linen from a ship at one end of the Canal, and send it back clean, via the Panama Railroad, before the vessel reaches the other side of the Isthmus. What with these, and the handy tanks and pipe-line of the Union Oil Company of California, and his own dry-docks, coal-bunkers, and barges, Uncle Sam will be able to supply every ship going through the Canal with anything from a sea-biscuit to a new propeller-shaft. Not only will these superior accommodations attract commerce to Panama that would otherwise go to Suez, but some day this peaceful, profitable trade may be worth more to us than