areholders, mostly French peasants of small means, and for a time the
project of interoceanic communication by way of Panama seemed hopeless.
The experience, however, proved clearly the utter impossibility of
private enterprise carrying forward a project of such magnitude and
which had attained a stage where large additional funds were needed to
make good enormous losses, due to errors in plans, to miscarriage of
effort, and, last but not least, to fraud on stupendous scale. With
admirable courage, however, the affairs of the first Panama Canal
Company were reorganized, after the appointment of a receiver, on
February 4, 1889. A scientific commission of inquiry was appointed to
reinvestigate the entire project and report upon the work actually
accomplished and its value in future operations. The commission, made up
of eminent engineers, sent five of its members to the Isthmus to study
the technical aspects of the problem, and a final report was rendered on
May 5, 1890. The recommendation of the commission was for the
construction of a canal with locks, the abandonment of the sea-level
idea, and for a further and still more thorough inquiry into the facts,
upon the ground that the accumulated data were "far from possessing the
precision essential to a definite project." This took the project of
canal construction out of the domain of preconceived ideas based upon
guesswork into the substantial field of a scientific undertaking for
commercial purposes. The receiver at once commenced to reorganize the
affairs of the company, and accordingly, on October 21, 1894, the new
Panama Canal Company came into existence under the general laws of
France. The charter of the new company provided for the appointment of a
technical committee to formulate a final project for the completion of
the canal. This committee was organized in February, 1896, and reached a
unanimous conclusion on November 16, 1898, embodied in an elaborate
report, which is probably the most authoritative document ever presented
on an engineering subject. The recommendation of the commission was
unanimously in favor of a lock canal.[1]

The subsequent history of the De Lesseps project and the American effort
for a practical route across the Isthmus are still fresh in our minds
and need not be restated. The Spanish-American war and the voyage of the
_Oregon_ by way of Cape Horn, more than any other causes, combined to
direct the attention of the American people to co