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At last I put Colonel Goethals in as head of the commission.
The difficulties of building new yards, of collecting trained workmen and technicians were undoubtedly great, but they might have been overcome more easily had not unfortunate differences developed between William Denman, the chairman of the Board, who advocated wooden ships, and General George W. Goethals, the head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, who depended upon steel construction.
Gorgas had already performed an inestimable service by caring for the sanitary conditions so thoroughly as to make the Isthmus as safe as a health resort. Colonel Goethals proved to be the man of all others to do the job. It would be impossible to overstate what he has done.
The construction of the canal was at once undertaken and the work was carried through successfully by General Goethals and a corps of army engineers. It was opened to commerce August 15, 1914, though it was not completed at that time and traffic was subsequently interrupted by landslides.
Acute friction arose between General Goethals and Mr. Denman, mainly over the question of the former's negotiations and plans with the steel interests.
George Goethals predestined to become the engineer of the Panama Canal from the foundation of the world, or might he have become a farmer, a physician, or a poet? Could Julius Cæsar have turned back from the Rubicon and refrained from saying, "The die is cast"? Could Abraham Lincoln have withheld his pen from the Emancipation Proclamation and permitted the negro race to continue in slavery?
E. R. Stettinius of the J. P. Morgan firm and a Republican was made special assistant to the Secretary of War and placed in charge of supplies, a duty that he had been discharging for the Allies. Maj. Gen. George W. Goethals, after his unfortunate experience in shipbuilding, was given a second chance and put in the War Department as an assistant Chief of staff. The Chief of Staff himself, Gen.
Peyton C. March, was a Republican no less definite and regular than General Goethals. Mr. Samuel McRoberts, president of the National City Bank and one of the pillars of the Republican party, was brought to Washington as chief of the procurement section in the Ordnance Section, with the rank of brigadier-general, Maj. Gen.
It is the greatest task of any kind that any man in the world has accomplished during the years that Colonel Goethals has been at work. It is the greatest task of its own kind that has ever been performed in the world at all. Colonel Goethals has succeeded in instilling into the men under him a spirit which elsewhere has been found only in a few victorious armies.
They are led to think of Goethals in the field of applied mathematics; of Burbank in the realm of botany; of Edison in physics; of Scott and Burns in literature; of Max Müller in philology; of Schliemann in archæology; of Washington and Lincoln in the realm of statesmanship; and of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton in philanthropy.
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