The Oregon daily journal., February 16, 1908, Page 24, Image 24

M
Panama
JXTTAPOLEON, standing five feet and
f -a few inches, in the shadow of the
Pyramids, acknowledged the van
ity of humaH greatness.
If, instead of perishing in the living
tomb to which England's terror condemned
him, Napoleon had survived only a few
years longer than the last veterans of his
disastrous Waterloo, he might have beheld
the Mwe-tnspirmg Pyramids dwarfed into
insigmpcance jrom ine standpoint 'of
building achievement by the labors of the
newest nation among the great peoples of
the earth, even as the Pyramids were the
enduring expression of the genius of the
oldest people among the ancient nations.
e t .1 . t . r
IS apoleofi paused in awe under the
t V g " 'W,f
shadow of thejyramids because those giant
structures of stone represented the marvel
ous building achievements of a wonderful
Bymh9wm JIM' ! w-
Wekrs Work in T.rXry tew .''iixisM l
Egypt. is Handled ixiij v hm . .. ,
EGYPT'S proud possession, the Pyramids,
which called for the lapse of centuries,
the ambitions of dynasties, the endless,
arduous toil of races, in orde. to insure their
completion, will remain the wonder of ages yet
to come. But the new Napoleons, with their
Soaring dreama of conquest, must betake them-pelve-
to the hemisphere of the New World
if they would be awed into reverent silence.
For the Panama canal force, with no more
awe than a gang of coal .beavers in the presence
of a pile of egg-size and a gondola, would dig
into any ol pyramid which any old Pharaoh
left lying around loose, and cart it off as coolly
as though it happened to be an ordinary hill
that had the bad luck to be in its road.
) Somehow, within the last year, the American
people have suddenly had. a great surcease of
anxiety concerning the canal. For months, ap
parently, nobody has been worrying.
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PORTLAND,
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upon whjch hiu and tradition had
cast romantc lights and shadows. He had
no foresight of what was to be accom-
pnshed within less than a century of his
death. .
Rverv fiftv workinr davs the toilers who
are brinrinr the Panama canal into bein?
OO O I 0
are moving an amount of material equaVto that have been the wonder of the age, re
the Great Pyramid of Cheops, wifich con- veal more clearly than anything else the
sumed the labor of 1 00,000 men for twen- marvelous progress of the world.
This change appears to have been coincident
with the appointment of Colonel Goethals to
the direction of the work. He has made the
dirt fly, and that was what the people wished
to see. Now, it seems, they are not bothering
especially about the progress, of work on the
great waterway; they know it is being pushed
with all the speed that engineering skill and
the most modern machinery can guarantee.
Not the least gratifying report that has come
from Panama cho mort recent is that a bulk
equal to the great Pyramid of Cheops is being
removed every fifty working days.
It is really a marvelous work, that being done
at Panama, when one pauses to grasp more
tban a mere outline. To those millions of tons
which are being flung far from the places
where nature put them, thousands of the most
astute intellects have contributed the means.
Modern American engineers, embodying' the
OREGON, SUNDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 16, 1903
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ty years in the building and,the services of
the same numberjor ten years in construct
ing the road connecting the work with the
quarries
Tfius sharply brought into contrast,
modern methods of doinr treat thinrs. as
viewed in the livhl of Dast achievements
latest and finest flower of mechanical genius,
who imbue Jamaican indolence with energy and
Spanish brawn with brains, are themselves
nothing more than the living summaries of the
science which went before them, plus the grains
they bring to the common lore in their day and
generation grains that loom so large in living
eyea and yet serve only to raise the general
ascent in the long perspective of time.
The tools they use herculean engines for
an Augean labor are stamped ineffaceably
with the sign manuals of a J ames Watt, a Ben
jamin Franklin, a Morse, a Baldwin, a Bell of
the whole distin,TUished train of scientists, stu
dents, inventors and improvers, whose triumphs f
were indispensable to the triumphs of the men
who use them.
Even Frenchmen, who failed so lamentably
Where we are assured of such signal success, .
contributes their quota to the knowledge
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itV"" It" w
t i ilTr"' '" "fill iiff a
which now makes facile all that they, in their
immature decade of science, proved so hope
lessly impossible.
It is, then, not the American peopler alone,
but the whole human race that is thinking and
toiling there on the isthmus,, concentrated in
its latest machinery, its powerful locomotives,
its insatiate steam shovels. '
Yet, for all that, the stupendous figures of
the accomplishment do not dwindle in the as-
tounded gaze. In one month November of v
the year just past the excavation from the
line of the canal aggregated 1.838,486 cubio
yards. . . ' ;-
Spread in any city of the Union,, the earth
which was mado to fly from-the canal during a
single month, would have buried ten solid i
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blocks under forty solid feet of earth and
archeologists would have had to dig-for ' tha
Bibles and the set? of Shakespeare in the par
lore harder than they digged for the Temple.
Library at Nippur, more blindly for the kettles
in the kitchens than they .quested for amphorae
in vanished llerculaneum. '
Napoleon in awe of the Pyramids I The men
who had already reduced the Pyramids to .mud
heaps, if be could' have foreseen the results of
their labor-saving devices when their principles
should be applied, to the tasks of the future,
were born and buried before, he scratched his
first mosquito bite in Egypt. Those mountains '
of earth, flung aside so contemptuously durinif
a lone month of American digging, are nature's
tribute to man's intelligence. 1
Computations made of the labor-saving value
of machines, of - which y Americana i are most
prodigal when need comes, during one month o i
the dry season'; atvPanama, afford ft ;i bint o '
what it means!. to" this country to" use steam
shovels, each one of which could dig out 18,600
cubic yards a month. . " - -
wcluding the men employed in moving up tho
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fihorel and' clearing the. track, the engineer and
tne trainmen,; the,? serr
andlaborerai ia required for the 70-ton. an 1
S5-ton steam ehpvela. In the one dry month just
6poken : of 815,270 cubio yards of earth vert
handled it 'would have taken 8165 laborer s,
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