died.

To describe the battles with the allies would be interminable and
wearying. In every particular they are much alike: the long silent
night march, the rush at daybreak, the fight to gain strategic
positions either of the barracks, or of the Cathedral in the Plaza,
the hand-to-hand fighting from behind barricades and adobe walls. The
out-come of these fights sometimes varied, but the final result was
never in doubt, and had no outside influences intervened, in time each
republic in Central America would have come under the five-pointed star.

In Costa Rica there is a marble statue showing that republic represented
as a young woman with her foot upon the neck of Walker. Some night a
truth-loving American will place a can of dynamite at the foot of that
statue, and walk hurriedly away. Unaided, neither Costa Rica nor any
other Central American republic could have driven Walker from her soil.
His downfall came through his own people, and through an act of his
which provoked them.

When Walker was elected president he found that the Accessory Transit
Company had not lived up to the terms of its concession with the
Nicaraguan Government. His efforts to hold it to the terms of its
concession led to his overthrow. By its charter the Transit Company
agreed to pay to Nicaragua ten thousand dollars annually and ten per
cent. of the net profits; but the company, whose history the United
States Minister, Squire, characterized as "an infamous career of
deception and fraud," manipulated its books in such a fashion as to
show that there never were any profits. Doubting this, Walker sent a
commission to New York to investigate. The commission discovered the
fraud and demanded in back payments two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. When the company refused to pay this, as security for the
debt Walker seized its steamers, wharves, and storehouses, revoked its
charter, and gave a new charter to two of its directors, Morgan and
Garrison, who, in San Francisco, were working against Vanderbilt. In
doing this, while he was legally in the right, he committed a fatal
error. He had made a powerful enemy of Vanderbilt, and he had shut off
his only lines of communication with the United States. For, enraged
at the presumption of the filibuster president, Vanderbilt withdrew his
ocean steamers, thus leaving Walker without men or ammunition, and as
isolated as though upon a deserted island. He possessed Vanderbilt's
boats upon the San Juan