The Central-American cannot understand that when a bad man is elected to office legally it is better in the long-run that he should serve out his full term than that a better man should drive him out and defy the constitution. If he could be brought to comprehend that when the constitution says the president must serve four years that means four years, and not merely until some one is strong enough to overthrow him, it might make him more careful as to whom he elected to office in the first place. But the value of stability in government is something they cannot be made to understand. It is not in their power to see it, and the desire for change and revolution is born in the blood. They speak of a man as a “good revolutionist” just as we would speak of some one being a good pianist, or a good shot, or a good executive officer. It is a recognized calling, and the children grow up into fighters; and even those who have lived abroad, and who should have learned better, begin to plot and scheme as soon as they return to their old environment. In each company of soldiers in Honduras there are two or three little boys in uniform who act as couriers and messengers, and who are able, on account of their slight figure, to penetrate where a man would be seen and shot. One of the officers in the revolution of 1894 told me he had sent six of these boys, one after another, with despatches across an open plain which was being raked by the rifles of the enemy. And as each boy was killed as he crawled through the sage-brush the other boys begged of their colonel to let them be the next to go, jumping up and down around him and snapping their fingers like school-boys who want to attract the attention of their teacher. In the same revolution a young man of great promise and many acquirements, who had just returned from the States with two degrees from Columbia College, and who should have lived to turn his education to account in his own country, was killed with a rifle in his hand the third day after his arrival from New York. In that city he would probably have submitted cheerfully to any imposition of the law, and would have taken it quite as a matter of course had he been arrested for playing golf on Sunday, or for riding a bicycle at night without a lamp; but as soon as this graduate of Columbia smelled the powder floating on his native air he loaded a rifle, and sat out all day on the porch of his house taking chance shots at the revolutionists on the hill-side, until a chance shot ended him and his brilliant career forever. The pity of it is that so much good energy should be wasted in obtaining such poor results, for nothing better ever seems to follow these revolutions. There is only a new form of dictatorship, which varies only in the extent of its revenge and in the punishments it metes out to its late opponents, but which must be, if it hopes to remain in power, a dictatorship and an autocracy. [Illustration: MORAZAN, THE LIBERATOR OF HONDURAS]