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the world there is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villany, so much foul disease, such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering. By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's lottery box. Almost all that money, I was told, has been already spent, and only a fifth of the work is done. Meanwhile the human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers, card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scor pions, and centipedes ; the home, even as nature made it, of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made im measurably more deadly by the multitudes of people who crowd thither. Half buried in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human machines which have broken down there, picked clean by the vultures. Everything which imagina tion can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral surroundings of ‘ the greatest undertaking of our age,’ but my curiosity was less strong than my disgust. I did not see the place, and the descrip tion which I have given may be overcharged. The accounts which reached me, however, were uniform and consistent. N