It is very well for President Zelaya, or Barrios, or Vasquez, or whatever his name may happen to be this month, to write to the New York _Herald_ and tell the people of the United States what the revolution in his country means. It does no harm; no one in the United States reads the letter, except the foreign editor who translates it, and no one in his own country ever sees it, but it makes him happy in thinking he is persuading some one that he governs in his own way. As a matter of fact he does not. His country, no matter what her name may be, is ruled by a firm of coffee-merchants in New York city, or by a German railroad company, or by a line of coasting steamers, or by a great trading-house, with headquarters in Berlin or London or Bordeaux. If the president wants money he borrows it from the trading-house; if he wants arms, or his soldiers need blankets, the trading-house supplies them. No one remembers now who was President of Peru when Henry Meiggs was alive, and to-day William L. Grace is a better name on letters of introduction to Chili and Peru than that of a secretary of state. When we were in Nicaragua, one little English banking-house was fighting the minister of finance and the minister of foreign affairs and the president and the entire government, and while the notes issued by the bank were accepted at their face value, those of the government were taken only in the presence of a policeman or a soldier, who was there to see that you did take it. You find this condition of affairs all through Central America, and you are not long in a republic before you learn which merchant or which bank or which railroad company controls it, and you soon grow to look upon a mule loaded with boxes bearing the trade-mark of a certain business-house with more respect than upon a soldier who wears the linen ribbon of the government. For you know that at a word the soldier will tear the ribbon from his straw sombrero and replace it with another upon which is printed “Viva Dr. Somebody Else,” while the trade-mark of the business-house will continue as long as English and German merchandise is carried across the sea in ships. And it will also continue as long as Great Britain and Germany and the United States are represented by consuls and consular agents who are at the same time the partners of the leading business firms in the seaport over which their consular jurisdiction extends. For few Central-American republics are going to take away a consul’s exequatur as long as they owe him in his unofficial capacity for a large loan of money; and the merchant, on the other hand, knows that he is not going to suffer from the imposition of a forced loan, nor see his mules seized, as long as the tin sign with the American eagle screaming upon it is tacked above the brass business plate of his warehouse.