they have swarmed down to the isthmus, and are still swarming thither in
tens of thousands, tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day
which M. Lesseps is furnishing. The vessel which called for us at
Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as we went on.
Their average stay is for a year. At the end of a year half of them have
gone to the other world. Half go home, made easy for life with money
enough to buy a few acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless
as school-boys they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but
the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at their own
doors if there were any one to employ them, but quiet industry is out of
joint, and Darien has seized their imaginations as an Eldorado.

If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there
is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much foul disease,
such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the
scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.
By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of
English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a
highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the
happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were
tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's
lottery box. All that money and more besides, I was told, had been
already spent, and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the
human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers,
card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their
charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp
tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes,
alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it,
of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more
deadly by the multitudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried
in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent
out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they
were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human
machines which have broken down there.[12] Everything which imagination
can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into
that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral
surroundings