COMMERCIAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 179, 2 September 1909, Page 4

COMMERCIAL.

LONDON WOOL MARKET. Dalgety and Co., Ltd., report having received the following cable message froiu their London house under date of the 30tli lift:— Wool market very linn, and prices if anything a shade higher, especially for merino ami fins crossbred wools. CUTTING THROUGH A CONTINENT UNCLE SAM'S GREAT ENGINEERING ENTERPRISE. Forty thousand men are busy making the greatest canal the world has ever seen. This canal is' to cut the narrow neck of land that joins North and South America. Tlii' announcement that the United StaWs Government have decided on the plans and fortification marks an importam- ..lagc in the completion of what is ccrlainly the greatest engineering enterprise ever attempted. The L'anauia canal will, when finished, have cost anywhere between eighty and a hundred million sterling. At the lower figure the cost will be about live times that of the Suez Canal.

The canal will be 200 ft. wide at the bottom, and have a depth of 41ft. Tlie biggest ship yet launched, the Miiuretania, draws at the utmost 37ft. The Suez Canal has' a depth of only 29ft. The distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific is here only thirty-live miles, but in those thirty-five miles two great difficulties faced the engineers. One was a rocky hill, 310 ft. high, the other a river which in Hood time has been known to rise 35ft. in one day. Both obstacles lay right across the path of the proposed canal. Through that hill a gigantic cutting is k'ing made. The river difficulty has been overcome by a mighty dam (witn sluices), built a«T«iw> the valley through which the river runs. This diini is a mile and a-half long and half a mile broad. TIIKKE MIGHTY LOCK*. It will turn the river into a lake the size of London. Along this lake, which will obligingly lie with its greatest length across 'the Isthmus, vessels will steaim for thirty miles. There will, then, be only ten miles of actual canal, or twenty if we count the deep channel which will have to be cut in nuin oceans from the shallow coast out to the open sea. A ship going from the Atlantic to the Pacific will enter the canal at. Colin and hail along at sea-level till she comes to the dam. Three mighty locks, s.'l end to end, each 1000 ft. long and 110 ft. wide, will lift her on to the lake. Then she will sail through the Culebra Cut. Due lock now and two further on will let her gently down to the Pacific level. She will steam out at La Boca, near the town of Panama.

Curiously enough, the sea at the Atlantic end is tidclcss', while the Pacific has a title of 20ft. Of the 40,000 men two-thirds are West Indian negroes. Of the whites the majority are Spaniards. Many nationalities have been experimented with, ami these arc found to stand the heat best. The beds and hanks of the canal resound to the clanking of the greatest collection of machinery ever brought toj gether for one purpose. There arc _ a j hundred steaiu-s'hovels, each of which can shift a thousand cubic yards a dav, or six hundred two-horse loa^is. 1 The bed of the canal and the terraced sides of the great Culebra Cut arc a maze of railway tracks for the use of the dirt trains. Tile track-shifter was invented by a canal workman, ana is an engine of almost uncanny intelligence. It picks up these temporary Tracks' and relays them as fney are I needed.

This is the third attempt to build the canal. Le Lesseps, the engineer who •constructed the Suez Canal, was the ■first to tackle the harder task.- Flushed -with his former triumph and refusing to admit tiie possibility of failure, he spent money like water. In eight years 1)0.000,000 sterling had vanished. Then 3:i>' company went into liquidation. After another company had carried on the work for twelve years, the States stepped in in 1001 and bought the undertaking. As far back as 1850 America and Britain had agreed to share in the making of the canal at Panama. But the opening of the Suez Canal had done all Britain wanted, in bringing her marc: lo the East than tin? Panama Canal could. So Britain backed out.

EWTirrUTED A SANITATION DEPARIIENT. America took the work seriously in hand. In 100.") she realised that she had been putting the cart before the horse. The Isthmus had always been a hot-bed yf yellow fever and malaria. In that vcar in particular a sort of panic reignI'd there. -Many oll'icials resigned and lied home. Workmen were dying oil' ■ike flies. So the States instituted a Sanitation Department of over 4000 men, who took the drainage system and the food supply thoroughly in hand. They paved tli'i- towns, liiled up the swamps, and set. a fast steamer running to and from New York to bring food in refrigerators.

So now a train leaves Colon every morning with supplies of fresn meat, vegetables, eggs, and so on, for the honrdinghouscs and hotels along . the canal route. Panama is now, even in the hot season, healthier than SJriw York.

The canal belongs entirely to the States, but is to be -aeiUtral in time of war. This means that when two foreign nations arc at war the canal will lie "open to both. If America herself is at war she will shut the canal against her enemy. The canal will be easy to defend for. as' we have seen, there is no lock within live or six miles of either entrance. And the locks, of course, are the vulnerable points.