REPORT OF BOARD OF CONSULTING ENGINEERS, PANAMA CANAL.


 CONCLUSION.

 THE HIGH-LEVEL LOCK CANAL FIRST-THE STRAITS OF PANAMA AFTERWARDS.

 The general idea embodied in the project for the erection of a lock canal, to be later transformed to sea level, answers rigorously to the conditions which the President of the United States has outlined to the members of the International Board of Consulting Engineers as controlling the problem submitted to them.
 The lock canal presented as corresponding to the first phase is the canal that can be opened with the utmost possible speed. The lock canal presented as corresponding to the first phase is also the canal that can be opened with the highest margin of safety. It is the canal which presents the lowest earth dam, annihilating, therefore, any risk whatever that could be opposed with justice to a higher earth dam. It is the canal that presents the lowest cut in the summit level, and, therefore, which reduces to the minimum the risk of finding a soft stratum necessitating large and long works to prevent a landslide, the very idea of which is terrifying in such a deep cut.
 For these two reasons it may be said that it is not only the quickest but also the safest to build, and that it affords the required ample and permanent communication between the oceans in exactly the same manner as any lock canal with a lower summit level, except for the time of transit, which the President of the United States has declared to be secondary, if compared with any economy of time and any reduction of risk during the construction.
 The President of the United States has also requested the Board to examine if, in case a multilock high-level canal should be adopted, it is possible later on to transform it to sea level.
 The argument presented demonstrates the feasibility of such a transformation under conditions of theoretical and practical perfection. It conveys outside of this particular quality the other and very essential feature of leading to a method of excavation of great power and corresponding cheapness, resolving entirely the labor question and utilizing the natural forces of the Isthmus to an unprecedented extent. With the great reduction in the price of excavation this system allows us to anticipate, as a simple and reasonable end of the transformation, not only the sealevel canal with a tidal gate on the Pacific, but the real bosphorus, the real Straits of Panama, which can be crossed in five hours. To acquire this desired end it is necessary to have a canal 45 feet deep at lowest tide, 500 feet wide at the bottom, and 600 feet wide at the water line. The tidal currents would, in such a.waterway, have no influence on the ships provided with abundant water under the keel and on their sides, and therefore provided with the necessary conditions to steer freely and to navigate with independence.
 Such a project, which would be chimerical with the ordinary system of works, as it would lead to a surplus excavation of 400,000,000 cubic yards over that of the canal with 150 feet width and 35 feet depth, is in itself a perfectly reasonable and a comparatively easy task to do in a maximum of twenty-five years, at a total price equal to that which would result from the immediate sea-level excavation by a dry process of a narrow tide-locked, sea-level canal. The schedule of time, which I think may be kept completely, would be, opening the 130-level canal in four years and excavating the rest of the waterway in twenty-one years.
 The present plan presents, then, if compared with the immediate sea-level execution by dry process, the opening to navigation in four years instead of twenty, at least, and the possibility of completing in about the same space of time required for the sea-level construction and at a cost about equal, a cut of 600,000,000 cubic yards, instead of 200,000,000 necessary for the narrow sea-level canal, thus creating a real bosphorus-the Straits of Panama-which will afford to shipping the open and unhampered passage, without any lock, tidal or no tidal, in a wide and deep waterway 600 feet wide at the water surface and 45 feet deep at the lowest tide.
 Such a programme, however tempting it is, was never formulated by anybody, because it would have required seventy-five years of time and $900,000,000 of money for its execution. It


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