reclaiming land; much has been carried out to sea and heaped into a break-water three miles long, which runs out from the Panama or southern end of the Canal, and will check a coast-ways current that might, if uncontrolled, silt up the approach.  The Canal is a triumph, not of man’s hands, but of machinery.  Regiments of steam shovels attack the banks, exhibiting a grotesque appearance of animal intelligence in their behavior.  An iron grabber is lowered by a crane, it pauses as if to examine the ground before it, in search of a good bite, opens a pair of enormous jaws, takes a grab, and, swinging round, empties its mouthful onto a railway truck.  The material is loosened for the shovels by blasts of dynamite and, all the day through, the air is shaken by explosions.  Alongside each row of shovels stands a train in waiting; over a hundred and fifty trains run seaward each day loaded with spoil.  The bed of the Canal is ribboned with railway tracks, which are shifted as required by special track-lifting machines.  The masonry work of the locks is laid without hands.  High latticed towers—­grinding mills and cranes combined—­overhang the wall that is being built up.  They take up stone and cement by the truck-load, mix them and grind them—­in fact, digest them—­and, swinging the concrete out in cages, gently and accurately deposit it between the molding boards.  How sharp is the contrast between this elaborate steam machinery and the hand-labor of the fellahin who patiently dug out the Suez Canal!  But there are, so to speak, edges to be trimmed:  this mass of machinery is to be guided and controlled, and there is work to employ a staff of over thirty thousand men.  Some four thousand of them are Americans, who form a superior service, styled “gold employees” in order to avoid racial implications.  Their salaries are calculated in American dollars.  The remainder, classed as “silver employees,” are paid in Panama dollars, the value of which is half that of the American.  Two series of coins are current, one being double the value of the other; and, since the corresponding coins of the two series are of about the same size, newcomers are harassed by constant suspicions of their small change.  The “silver employees” number about twenty-six thousand.  Some of them are immigrants from Europe—­mostly from Italy and the north of Spain—­but the great majority are negroes, British subjects from Jamaica and Trinidad.  It was foreseen that if negroes from the Southern States were employed, the high wages rates might unsettle the American cotton labor market:  so it was decided to recruit from British colonies, and it is not too much to say that, so far as the Canal is hand-made, it is mainly the work of British labor.  Several hundreds of Hindus have found their way here; they are chiefly employed upon the fortifications, because, it is said, they are unlikely to talk about them.  These British colored laborers, with their families, constitute the bulk of the population of the Canal