deposits of the coast-region. The Chontales gold mines have been worked for some time near Libertad, and so have the silver mines of Matagalpa and Dipilto; but the total annual yield of precious metals seldom exceeds $200,000.

The chief articles of export are cacao, hides, coffee, and gums, as well as gold and silver bullion; and in 1880 the exports amounted to $2,057,500, and the imports to $1,475,000. The revenue for this year was $2,435,000, while the expenditures slightly exceeded it. All Nicaraguans between the age of eighteen and thirtyfive are in the army.

For more than half a century Nicaragua has been darkly distinguished above all other countries of the world by war and bloodshed. Military pronunciamientos, civil war, and popular revolts have so exhausted all the resources of this rich country that it is quiet at last from utter exhaustion. Could these fermenting republics be induced to give up their absurd and expensive military establishments, and expend the money, now worse than wasted, in opening roads and teaching the people something besides military drill, the prosperity of this wonderfully fertile and agreeable region would be assured. Only their revolutionary habits now stand in the way of the introduction of foreign capital; and are not these habits fostered by the constant military display which guards the President and judges alike? It is certainly foreign to all Northern ideas to have a court of justice guarded by military sentinels. Would that this Eden might be reclaimed, the swords beaten into ploughshares, and the generals and other officers turn their wasted energies to agriculture and commerce!

12,000

51,056

Nicaragua is divided into the following departments, according to the census of 1882:

These figures cannot, however, be relied upon for the population. With a coast-line of two hundred and eighty miles on the Caribbean Sea, the only port is San Juan del Norte (Greytown), formed by the northern branch of the delta of the San Juan; and this is now nearly choked with sand. The Pacific coast is bold and rocky, extending nearly two hundred miles from Coseguina Point to Salinas Bay, and has several convenient harbors, as San Juan del Sur, Brito, and, best of all, Realejo. Among the chief cities is Leon, founded by Francisco Fernandez de Córdoba in 1523 in Imbita, near the northwest shore of Lago de Managua, whence it was moved in 1610 to the present site at the Indian town of Subtiaba. Managua, the capital of the republic, was nearly destroyed in 1876 by a land-slide, but is now rebuilt. Granada is the collegiate town of the republic, and is on the shores of the great lake. A railway has long been in process of construction to connect the capital with the ocean. In 1882 the telegraphic system of eight hundred miles was completed, and eighty-one thousand despatches were for

warded the preceding year through twenty-six offices. In 1882 the total attendance at the national schools was only five thousand, or less than eight per cent of the whole population. The annual grant for the purposes of education was $50,000.

The Mosquito coast cuts from Nicaragua a large portion of her shore-line, precisely as British Honduras robs Guatemala of hers; and this has been a cause of serious trouble. This territory, which is about forty miles wide, had been under the protection of Great Britain from 1655 to 1850, when that very un-American document the Clayton-Bulwer treaty gave England certain rights in her colony of Belize in exchange for such claims as she had to this coast, and by the treaty of Managua, in 1860, she formally ceded her protectorate to Nicaragua; but there are still several disputed points.

Costa Rica. The fifth and most southern republic of Central America has an area of only twenty-one thousand square miles. The Atlantic coast is low, and the country is covered with a dense forest, while the Pacific slope is characterized by wide savannas, or llanuras. Between these borders are high volcanoes and an elevated tableland three to four thousand feet above the sea, the latter almost the only cultivated land in the State. The forests are largely composed of very valuable trees, mahogany, ebony, brazil-wood, and oak; and the usual tropical fruits grow well. Coffee, however, is the staple export, being grown extensively in the neighborhood of San José and Cartago; the soil most favorable being dark volcanic ash, from three to eighteen feet deep. The amount exported in 1874 was valued at $4,464,000; in 1885 the amount is placed at $4,219,617.

In

On the Atlantic side Puerto Limon is the chief commercial town, and on the Pacific, Punta Arenas. 1871 the Government negotiated a loan in London of $5,000,000, and the next year another of $12,000,000, but from both of them never received more than $5,058,059.60,- with the avowed intention of building an inter-oceanic railway between the two principal ports; but only detached portions have been built,― twenty-four miles from Alajuela to Cartago, sixty from Limon to Carrillo, and six from Punta Arenas to Esparta. The country is bankrupt, and makes no attempt to pay any part of its liabilities; indeed, its revenues, derived from intolerable duties (even on the export of coffee), monopolies of spirits and tobacco, national bank, sales of land, and internal taxes, do not balance the expenditures.

The legislature is composed of a Congress of Deputies, -one for each electoral district, holding office six years, half being renewed every three years. The members of the Corte de Justicia are elected by Congress. The present constitution (from 1871) is the seventh that has been in force, The departments are,

The population is estimated by M. Belly.

Both the northern boundary on Nicaragua, and the

southern one on Columbia, are in dispute.1

1 Guatemala has been accepted (1886) by both Nicaragua and Costa Rica as referee in the boundary dispute.

I have endeavored to give most briefly the chief matters of importance relating to the four republics that, with Guatemala, constitute Central America. I am well aware that I have turned, that I can turn but little light on the darkness; too little is known of the country, beyond its trade and political relations to the rest of the world. Volcanoes, earthquakes, and revolutions have popularly been associated with the whole region, and public taste has been turned away from such unpleasant outbreaks of subterranean fires or human passions. The time will come when these regions, far more fertile and accessible. than those African wilds that for a score of years have interested, strangely enough, both explorer and capitalist, will claim the attention due their natural merits; and the fertile plains will be the garden and orchard of the United States, not necessarily by political annexation, but by commercial intercourse. All our sugar, all our coffee, all our rice, all our chocolate, all our india-rubber ought to come from Central America, where these products can be raised better and cheaper than in any other country; and next to these staples, the subsidiary fruits, as oranges, plantains, bananas, pines, limes, granadillas, aguacates, and dozens of others now unknown to commerce, ought to come to us from Limon, Puerto Cortez, and Livingston. These are to be obtained in Guatemala of better quality and in better order than in the West Indies. Louisiana would then perhaps give up the unnatural cultivation of sugar, and Florida cease her useless striving to raise really good oranges, and both States turn to the products they are better fitted for raising.