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Great Britain is the preponderating user of the canal, with Germany a poor second. Holland, due to proprietorship of Dutch India, is third in the list, and the nation of De Lesseps is fourth. The United States stands near the foot of the roll of patrons, being only represented by an occasional warship, transport going to or coming from the Philippines, or a touring yacht.
For over twenty years a contest had been waged between experts in the United States as to the relative merits of the Panama and the Nicaragua routes. The latter was the more popular, perhaps because it seemed at one time that Panama was preempted by De Lesseps' French company.
De Lesseps died in a madhouse and practically a pauper, while Ismail spent his last years a prisoner in a gilded palace on the Bosporus, and was permitted to return to his beloved country only after death. These are but some of the tragic side-lights of the great story of the Suez Canal.
Lesseps considered his views, and some years after made the acquaintance of Lieutenant Waghorn, favorably known in connection with the Overland Route to India by the way of Egypt. The route by descending the Euphrates River to the head of the Persian Gulf was also considered.
His career soon after ended in suicide and his party disappeared. The second event spoken of was the Panama Canal affair. De Lesseps, the maker of the Suez Canal, had undertaken to excavate a similar one across the Isthmus of Panama, but the work was managed with such wild extravagance that vast sums were spent and the poor investors widely ruined, while the canal remained a half-dug ditch.
Most picturesquely this information was brought by M. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a former engineer of the De Lesseps company, who glowed with the excitement of coming events. Roosevelt, however, relied more upon the information furnished by two American officers, who reported "that various revolutionary movements were being inaugurated." On October 10, 1903, the President wrote to Dr.
Adams above quoted, as to the perpetual character of the obligations imposed by the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, the obligatory force of that instrument after the readjustment of 1860 was not seriously questioned until interest in the canal question was suddenly aroused anew by the concession granted by Colombia to Lieutenant Wyse in 1878, and the subsequent organization of a French construction company under the presidency of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the promoter of the Suez canal.
He is the son of Jean Baptiste Barthelemi, Baron de Lesseps, who was born at Cette, a French port on the Mediterranean, in 1765. Jean Baptiste was for five years French Vice-Consul at St. Petersburg. In 1785 he accompanied La Perouse on a voyage to Kamtchatka, whence he brought by land the papers containing a description of the expedition. In 1788 he was Consul at Kronstadt and St. Petersburg.
In a sitting in the French Assembly, a member of the opposition said to the President of the Council: 'You are going to reinstate the Pope! 'No, no, ejaculated Odilon Barrot. 'You are going to do the same as Austria, cried Lamoricière. 'We should be culpable if we did, was the answer. Lesseps' instructions, very vague, for the rest, were given to him in this spirit.
A marble bust of De Lesseps, the contractor of the Suez Canal, which we shall soon enter, has a prominent place. Through several streets, monotonous for disorder and uncleanliness, we reached the "Mosque," the Mahomedan place of worship.
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