Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The proceedings of the General Congress on the 23d, and in the Technical Commission on the 26th, are so significant that I shall append them without omissions. By reference to the Appendix, it will be seen that the partial quotations which I shall use do not present a perverted meaning. I will submit the question to every reader of the Appendix, whether, free from any comment, it is not patent that the Congress was not called to decide upon the best route for an inter-oceanic ship canal, but upon what was possible ma Panama. M. De Lesseps.—" That which struck us the most, is the enthusiasm of the United States of America in favor of the establishment of a canal at Panama." We may ask with surprise, when and where was this enthusiasm manifested ? I saw nothing of it; so far as my expression is concerned, it requires only very ordinary perceptions to accredit it as something more than that of an individual, inasmuch as I had been sent there by my Government. I again quote M. de Lesseps.—" Lieutenant Wyse and his companions have rendered us an account of the mission that they undertook. Seven of them set out, four are dead in those wilds where one is only able to effect a passage with a hatchet in the hand. They have then returned, and have had the honesty to declare to us that in their view a canal was impossible in the regions that they had returned from exploring." This seems sufficient to dispose of the historical sketch of M. Hertz, given on page 10 of the Proceedings, as follows: "The French committee of study for the inter-oceanic canal [in consequence of the completion of the surveys alluded to by M. de Lesseps] thus found itself able to submit to an International Canal Congress a collection [of information] upon which it would be able to pronounce intelligently. It ...