No one expected what afterward happened. In 1889 the works were stopped
for want of money; the affairs of the Canal were looked into; it was found
that there had been dishonesty and fraud, and in 1892 the great Count
Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal, and a number of other
prominent Frenchmen, were arrested for dealing dishonestly with the money
subscribed for the Canal.

There was a dreadful scandal; many of the high French officials had to
give up their positions, and run away for fear of arrest.

When the whole matter was understood, it was found that, for months before
the work was stopped, the men who had charge of the Canal had decided that
the work would cost such an enormous sum of money that it would be almost
an impossibility to complete it.

They did not have the honesty to let this be known, but allowed people to
go on subscribing money, a part of which they put in their own pockets,
and spent the rest in bribing the French newspapers not to tell the truth
about the Canal.

The worst of it was, that the money which had been subscribed was not from
rich people, who would feel its loss very little, but from poor people,
who put their savings, and the money they were storing away for their old
age, into the Canal; and when they lost it, it meant misery and poverty to
them.

So the Panama Canal failed.

But the project of making a canal was not given up. Two years before the