The shock to credit in France by this, the greatest
com- mercial failure of the century, is tremendous ; but it is broken by three facts. The peasantry do not even Yet believe that M. de Lesseps can be beaten; and there is, therefore, a belief, almost certainly groundless, that they will supply the capital required. The loss is widely distributed, scarcely any large blocks of shares or obligations remaining in any hands, or lying as security in any considerable bank. It is nearly certain that if the Canal is offered for sale, either the American Government or some American capitalists would offer a heavy price for its possession. M. de Lesseps says it shall never be sold, and that the old shareholders will form a new Company to take over the works at a price ; but M. de Lesseps is always sanguine and very old. The sum actually received and spent greatly exceeds fifty millions, the nominal obligations being one-half larger ; and the Canal will hardly be completed without forty millions more. As we have argued elsewhere, to buy out the old Company and raise the new capital by an issue of, say, sixty millions in preference shares, is an undertaking from which even M. de Lesseps may shrink. There is no English capital in the undertaking, and no English reason why Americans should not have it.
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