The situation in Paris will not be improved by a
letter wbi ch M. de Lesseps has addressed to M. Bouvier, demanding that the Assembly shall authorise the Panama Canal Company to raise a lottery loan of £22,000,000. This will raise the total amount to be expended on the work to £60,000,000; but for that sum it will, he says, be completed by February 3rd, 1890. If, however, the permission is not granted, then the works must stop, and the shareholders, unless the American Government buys the Canal, will lose their money. The Chamber will be most reluctant to grant the privilege ; but the shares in this Company are held all over France, and the ruin which will fall -upon thousands of households will help materially to discredit the Republic. A correspondent of the St. lameee Gazette, who seems well informed, says the ruin will, in such an event, be even more widespread than this account would indicate. M. de Lesseps, he says, gives the expenditure accurately ; but the loans have been raised at such enormous discounts—in one ease 56 per cent—that the total responsi- bility to the public will, on his own figures, be no less than 1 ,000,000 sterling. Much of this money, however, will have been returned to shareholders in interest, which commenced from the date of the raising of the loan. However that may be —and, of course, M. de Lesseps would give a very different account of the finance of his Company—the French Treasury will be sorely perplexed either to refuse or to grant the authorisation demanded.
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