The republics of Central America are republics in name only, and the movements of a stranger within the boundaries of Honduras are as closely watched as though he were a newspaper correspondent in Siberia. I often had to sign the names of our party twice in one day for the benefit of police and customs officers, and we never entered a hotel or boarded a steamer or disembarked from one that we were not carefully checked and receipted for exactly as though we were boxes of merchandise or registered letters. Even the natives cannot walk the street after nightfall without being challenged by sentries, and the collection of letters we received from alcaldes and comandantes and governors and presidents certifying to our being reputable citizens is large enough to paper the side of a wall. The only time in Central America when our privacy was absolutely unmolested, and when we felt as free to walk abroad as though we were on the streets of New York, was when we were under the protection of the hated monarchical institution of Great Britain at Belize, but never when we were in any of these disorganized military camps called free republics. The Central-American citizen is no more fit for a republican form of government than he is for an arctic expedition, and what he needs is to have a protectorate established over him, either by the United States or by another power; it does not matter which, so long as it leaves the Nicaragua Canal in our hands. In the capital of Costa Rica there is a statue of the Republic in the form of a young woman standing with her foot on the neck of General Walker, the American filibuster. We had planned to go to the capital for the express purpose of tearing that statue down some night, or blowing it up; so it is perhaps just as well for us that we could not get there; but it would have been a very good thing for Costa Rica if Walker, or any other man of force, had put his foot on the neck of every republic in Central America and turned it to some account. Away from the coasts, where there is fever, Central America is a wonderful country, rich and beautiful, and burdened with plenty, but its people make it a nuisance and an affront to other nations, and its parcel of independent little states, with the pomp of power and none of its dignity, are and will continue to be a constant danger to the peace which should exist between two great powers.