Excerpt from The Americans in Panama Canal requires that a writer not merely View the object which he describes, but that he actually become a part of the mechanism that is giving it form. He may thus practically illuminate observation with experience, and so vivify the object in his own thought, that his attempt to present it to others will be a close approximation of the truth. In the five months the author spent in Panama, he was for slightly more than three months an employee of the Isthmian Canal Commission, living the routine life of a canal employee. He discovered that, had he followed the usual method of coming into the Canal Zone on one steamer, taking notes, and leav ing on the next steamer, he would have missed many fundamental facts, which absolutely must be known if a really trustworthy account of the greatest task of the age is desired. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.