M. Ferdinand de Lesseps died on December 7th, at the
age of eighty-nine. He was not a great engineer or a man of great insight, or even a great man of business, but he was the ideal promoter of our time,—a man of perfect personal honesty, few scruples, and a will of iron. Aided by his relationship to the Empress Eng4nie, and a personal friend- ship with the Khedive Ismail, he succeeded in obtaining a decree authorising him to finish the Suez Canal by forced labour ; and at the expense of many thousand lives he did finish it, only to find that the trade of Asia, which he had hoped to divert to France, had concentrated itself on England. The Canal paid magnificently, and M. de Lesseps decided to cut another through the Isthmus of Panama. He raised for that project, first and last, seventy millions sterling ; but his grand success had made him reckless, he tried to over- come. all difficulties, national, international, and legislative, by a lavish expenditure, which often included bribes, and at last he found that the money was gone, that he was very old, and that the Canal was not made. A certain grandeur of will in him must be acknowledged, and he undoubtedly altered the commercial relations of Europe to Asia ; but he was as callous as a great General to human suffering, and though he never stole, he must have overlooked stealings, which he thought would not signify if the total result was a 20 per cent. dividend. We cannot call him a great man, but he was a great figure in the history of modern commerce,
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