THE NICARAGUA CANAL. TWO THOUSAND AT WORK.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 405, 25 September 1889, Page 5

THE NICARAGUA CANAL. TWO THOUSAND AT WORK.

The following interesting: statement, with regard to fhe above project, is culled from papers by the last San Francisco mail :—: — Mr Martinez, a wealthy and well posted business man of Santa Ana, Salvador, was one of the passengers by the steamer San Jose, which arrived at San Franci3co recently. " 1 am happy to tell you," daid he, " that there is nothing in thobe reports that have reached San Francisco about work beine: stopped on the Nicaragua canal. Everything was going on very smoothly when I left, and about 2,Q00 men were actively a.t work. " The story about the difficulty between Costa liica a,nd Nicaragua and the work being stopped is a.n error. It has not been stopped at all, and no troops have been marshalled by either State. I may say, too, that there will nob be. Both are anxious to se,e the canal completed. The Central American States know that fehe Nicaragua Canal will be far hatter for them than the Panama Canal. We expect it to be finished in four years. "Times are good and money very plentiful down the coast, but there is hot such prosperity now as there will be a little later- on. Our winter is from April to October, and qn this account not so much work is being done on the canal as there will be after October Ist. "But there is even now a scarcity of labourers. We do not need professional m.en, an,d clerks, but solid bone and sinew. There is much to do down there, and the oanal will be a great moving power all through Central America, It is bound to increa.se the coffee crop. Already ib is larger than it has ever been. Salvador will bhjs year produce 400,000 kintels, Costa Rica 400,000, Nicaragua 1,000,000 and Guatemala 600,000. at the least. As the coffee is worth from $18 to $25 a kintel and a kintel is about the size of an American bushel, you can see what a product there is and what it will bring. " Undoubtedly the Nicaragua canal will be in one way and another productive of more good to the entire Pacific coast than any other enterprise which has been inaugurated, "You may depend upon it that the trifling misunderstanding which Nicaragua and Costa Rica had will never stop the canal. They are too anxious to see the work go right ahead."

Japan covers an area of 157,000 square miles ; not quite as large as California. It has a population of 38,000,000. The Hindu women travel as lightly as the men, but the two sexes are never put into the same railroad cars.