country over and you will find none more forceful, none more sagacious, none more capable of bringing things to pass than the men at the head of our universities. A breath of scandal has never touched them. They have handled millions and will die poor; they have put their impress on thousands of young men and women and have left them better and not worse; they have helped mold national public opinion and always in the interest of a truer democracy. Standing between wealth and

life they have made mammon the minister of culture and idealism. Often misunderstood, often forced into impossible straits, they are a nation's best asset. At the head of institutions separated by history and circumstances and traditions they are really one in influence. be Jesse; Princeton, Wilson; Chicago, Harper; Michigan, Angell; Minnesota, Northrop: Harvard, Eliot; Hopkins, Gilman; but altogether they are among the men of the new America.

Missouri may

T

HE Isthmus of Panama has had two periods of world importance. One was when all the western march of victorious Spain pressed over it to the sack of Peru. Then Panama was the queen city of the Pacific, taking its toll from every gold galleon, sending the spoils across treacherous Pedrarias' paved road to Porto Bello and, in the great treasure fleet, to old Spain. The other period, starting with the discovery of gold in California, is bound up with the history of the Panama Railroad.

On January 14, 1848, John Marshall made his find in the mill sluice near Sacramento at a time when the treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo, confirming the transfer of this territory to the United States, was still unsigned. In July a curious crowd of Mexican herders assembled to hear California proclaimed a territory of the United States. Then followed the rush that raised Yerba Buena from the village of some two hundred souls, to the populous and lawless San Francisco. Thither from every quarter of the globe were drawn the adventurous, the unsuccessful, the ambitious, the flotsam and jetsam of this hemisphere and of the others. A memorable horde came by way of the Isth

mus.

It was in this period of disturbed equilibrium, of whole armies hounded west

ward by thoughts and imaginings, that the Panama Railroad Company grasped the key to the Pacific, the key that it still holds.

The Construction Period

The stars fought for the young Panama Railroad. It was conceived previous to the boom, to the end of reaching only the normal commerce of the Pacific. Like dozens of similar schemes it was on the way to oblivion. But the herald of California's Golden Age breathed life into the project as he passed. Steps were at once taken to confirm the provisional concession from New Granada, secured by John L. Stephens, and in 1849 surveys were begun. A charter was granted to the company by the New York Legislature, and in 1850 the first ground was broken.

The struggles of Chief Engineer Totten and his devoted assistants seem more like labors in a pitiless nightmare than in a world of actual deeds. In May, 1850, fifty men were rowed from the brig in Navy Bay to the marshy mangrove thicket which constituted Manzanillo Island, and began clearing. Through weary months they fought the morass and the jungle of the low coastal reaches. Totten and Baldwin took charge of the work alternately as their fever permitted. Standing waist high in the dank ooze from which steamed unceasingly the noxious miasma, veiled against intolerable insects, and drenched with tropic downpours, these steadfast scouts of Empire still persisted.

In January, 1854, the summit of Culebra was reached from the Atlantic side. From the other direction the line was penetrating the less formidable jungle of the Pacific Slope. January 6, 1855, at midnight the two ends met and next day George Totten stood at the throttle as the first locomotive crossed the Isthmus.

The fight was won. After enormous difficulties, and at a cost of $8,000,000, twice its estimate, a line of rails had been carried across the forty-seven odd miles between Panama and the new city of Aspinwall. The work had been hastily and temporarily thrown together. The soft wooden ties could last in this climate but eight months. The bridge at Barbacoas was of wood. A grim legend declared that for every rail a life had been paid, but the railroad was an accomplished fact.

beyond that, of making the road pay dividends upon its great capital investment. That in the short space of three years this was accomplished is an indication of the road's value, and of the genius of the man who now for the first fifteen years managed the railway's operation, David Hoadley.

Trade came in an ever swelling stream. Between 1855 and 1865, $700,000,000 in specie and three hundred thousand bags of mail crossed without the loss of a letter or a dollar of money. Though the California business slackened with the exhaustion of the alluvial gold deposits, the trade with Central and South America increased by leaps and bounds. Receipts of freight had increased from $354,000 in 1857, to $2,738,000 in 1867 and to $3,000,000 in 1870. A new line of Central American steamers

Such was the condition, and such the prospect, when, in 1871, Alden B. Stockwell came into control of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line.

Stockwell and the Overland Roads

A new era in the road's history was marked by the advent of this financial soldier of fortune. While steward on a Hudson River steamer he had attracted the attention of a wealthy heiress, whom he followed to Paris and married. A few years later he was Commodore Stockwell, successor to Russell Sage as president and autocrat of the great Pacific Mail Steamship Company.

He, too, dreamed the century-old dream of the power that lay in Panama's potentiality as a trade route to the East. He grasped control of the great Pacific Mail Steamship Company at a time when its

nine directors in each company, he strove to bind them firmly together, and dictated the far-reaching contract by which the Panama Railroad pledged itself never in the future to interest itself in Pacific steamer business.

But Stockwell was not a force to endure. His unscrupulous methods had raised suspicion. His speculation and his subsidy campaigns in Congress had dissipated the strength that was needed to fight adversaries whose existence depended upon keeping the wide free seas a desert to competing ships. Startled by numerous rumors, the directors met secretly in March, 1873, to investigate the state of the company. They found that in his wider scheme Stockwell had lost control of the units. Jay Gould and the transcontinental roads had overborne him.