The Bogotan blackmailers indulged in still wilder dreams of
avarice; like the hasheesh-eater, they completely lost contact
with reality and truth. In one of their earlier compacts with the
French Company they stipulated that, if the Canal were not
completed by a certain day in 1904, the entire concession and
undertaking should revert to the Colombian Government. As it was
now September, 1903, it did not require the wits of a political
bandit to see that, by staving off an agreement with the United
States for a few months, Colombia could get possession of
property and privileges which the French were selling to the
Americans for $40,000,000. So the Colombian Parliament adjourned
in October, 1903, without even taking up the Hay-Herran Treaty.

Meanwhile the managers of the French Company became greatly
alarmed at the prospect of losing the sum which the United States
had agreed to pay for its rights and diggings, and it took steps
to avert this total loss. The most natural means which occurred
to it, the means which it adopted, was to incite a revolution in
the State of Panama. To understand the affair truly, the reader
must remember that Panama had long been the chief source of
wealth to the Republic of Colombia. The mountain gentry who
conducted the Colombian Government at Bogota treated Panama like
a conquered. province, to be squeezed to the utmost for the
benefit of the politicians. There was neither community of
interest nor racial sympathy between the Panamanians and the
Colombians, and, as it required a journey of fifteen days to go
from Panama to the Capital, geography, also, added its sundering
influence. Quite naturally the Panamanians, in the course of less
than half a century, had made more than fifty attempts to revolt