France should have the credit. Armed with an indomitable will, the most exact mathematical knowledge of every detail of the work and the engineering problems, and his own private fortune, he set out to put it through. Public opinion, revolutions, state secrets, the sanctity of courts and cabinets, the power of armies, and the destinies of peoples were thenceforth his tools and his media. That the Senator from Missouri—old Gum-shoe Bill Stone—should have failed to recognize such a personality and such a conception is no wonder. Bill's reasoning was not so very bad. He saw a revolution engineered in Panama with a promptness, decision, and unerring execution never before known. He concluded that it was the work of a genius. He decided that his great enemy, Roosevelt, was the most probable and convenient, if not the only genius on the boards. As we shall see, Roosevelt had no more to do with it than I had.
Well, when the company went into bankruptcy, Bunau-Varilla went to Germany and
