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

ISSUES GREAT AND LITTLE

845

way when discovered. It is only when I see the impossibility
of driving into the mind of those most interested the necessary
motives which should guide: their action that I am forced to
act in their place at the ultimate instant. My part in the fight
against Nature during the old De Lesseps time was exactly
what it has been more recently in the fight against man in the
latter period of this guerre inexpiable the end of which is in
sight, thanks to you, thanks to Mr. Laffan, thanks to The Sun.
Few stories of the imagination are more interesting
than that which this sentimentalist disclaimer of genius
for action wrote in the geography of great trade routes.
Philippe Bunau-Varilla is one of the two brothers owning
the Matin of Paris. A graduate of the Picole Polytechnique
and of Ponts et Chaus6es and an engineer officer of the
French Government, he was afterward chief engineer of
the De Lesseps construction. He came to The Sun introduced by John Bigelow, who had known him as a boy
when Bigelow was the American Minister at Paris before
the Franco-Prussian War. Through Myron T. Herrick,
himself to be the American Ambassador to France at a
later day, Bunau-Varilla made the acquaintance and acquired the powerful support of Mark Hanna. Through
General Dawes, then Comptroller of the Currency, he
reached McKinley. Every phase of the canal question was
at tongue's end with this envoy of the Panama idea. By
technical argument and scientific demonstration he convinced some of the eminent American engineers whose
judgment was to be potent. For every question that came
up his answer was ready, clear, logical, satisfying; he knew
the strata and streams of the isthmus as a traffic cop
knows the pavement and currents of Times Square. His
political vigilance and versatility would have excited

admiration in Matt Quay. Personally he won the confidence of John Hay and Theodore Roosevelt. And when
at the end of a brilliant legislative campaign the action
of Congress had reversed what had seemed, before he took