hould be built,
and my recommendation was adopted. Congress insisted upon having it
built by a commission of several men. I tried faithfully to get good
work out of the commission, and found it quite impossible; for a
many-headed commission is an extremely poor executive instrument. At
last I put Colonel Goethals in as head of the commission. Then, when
Congress still refused to make the commission single-headed, I
solved the difficulty by an executive order of January 6, 1908, which
practically accomplished the object by enlarging the powers of the
chairman, making all the other members of the commission dependent upon
him, and thereby placing the work under one-man control. Dr. Gorgas
had already performed an inestimable service by caring for the sanitary
conditions so thoroughly as to make the Isthmus as safe as a health
resort. Colonel Goethals proved to be the man of all others to do the
job. It would be impossible to overstate what he has done. It is the
greatest task of any kind that any man in the world has accomplished
during the years that Colonel Goethals has been at work. It is the
greatest task of its own kind that has ever been performed in the world
at all. Colonel Goethals has succeeded in instilling into the men under
him a spirit which elsewhere has been found only in a few victorious
armies. It is proper and appropriate that, like the soldiers of such
armies, they should receive medals which are allotted each man who has
served for a sufficient length of time. A finer body of men has never
been gathered by any nation than the men who have done the work of
building the Panama Canal; the conditions under which they have lived
and have done their work have been better than in any similar work ever
undertaken in the tropics; they have all felt an eager pride in their
work; and they have made not only America but the whole world their
debtors by what they have accomplished.

APPENDIX

COLOMBIA: THE PROPOSED MESSAGE TO CONGRESS

The rough draft of the message I had proposed to send Congress ran as
follows:

"The Colombian Government, through its representative here, and directly
in communication with our representative at Colombia, has refused to
come to any agreement with us, and has delayed action so as to make it
evident that it intends to make extortionate and improper terms with us.
The Isthmian Canal bill was, of course, passed upon the assumption that
whatever route was used, the benefit to