Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

honor and glory of France. The job he had undertaken
when the foregoing article was published was just begun:
namely, to bring down the excessive demands of the
money-hungry shareholders in Paris; in the United States
to convince engineers and to change the settled opinion
of some eighty million people and the substantially unanimous vote of one house of Congress; in Colombia to block
the schemes of certain politicians at Bogota, intriguing
to confiscate the company's property for the benefit of
their own country if not for the benefit of Germany; and
this in order to rescue from nullification that which France
had already accomplished on the Isthmus of Panama, to
wipe out the scar of national failure, and to vindicate in
the sight of history the second great conception of his
old chief, the builder of the Suez Canal. All this he did
in the end; and while he won many helpers before he was
through, it is not too much to say that without BunauVarilla it would not have been done.
I have spoken of his vast project as disinterested. At
first, when the psychology of the promoter was imperfectly understood in some quarters, it was the fashion to
attribute his zeal to speculative interest in New Panama
shares; as if that would have impelled him to make them
worth as little as possible. His relation to the sale to the
United States was that of a man who spent freely of his
own large means and used moral violence with the French
shareholders to force a decision at the time The Sun was
calling for a Napoleon. "It is absolutely true," he wrote
me in 1905, "that I had nothing to do with the sale of the
property to the U. S. except to recommend publicly, to
the weak men whose debility of mind and character had
closed any other honorable issue, to accept the price fixed

by the Isthmian Canal Commission." He added:
I am much better equipped for the careful and methodic
analysis of the elements of action than for action itself, and I
am always disposed to think that people will follow the right