ns. Quite undisturbed
by the financial situation, Zelaya promptly silenced local bickerings
and devoted his energies to altering the constitution for his
presidential benefit and to making trouble for his neighbors. Nor did
he refrain from displays of arbitrary conduct that were sure to provoke
foreign intervention. Great Britain, for example, on two occasions
exacted reparation at the cannon's mouth for ill treatment of its
citizens.

Zelaya waxed wroth at the spectacle of Guatemala, once so active in
revolutionary arts but now quietly minding its own business. In
1906, therefore, along with parties of Hondurans, Salvadoreans, and
disaffected Guatemalans, he began an invasion of that country and
continued operations with decreasing success until, the United States
and Mexico offering their mediation, peace was signed aboard an American
cruiser. Then, when Costa Rica invited the other republics to discuss
confederation within its calm frontiers, Zelaya preferred his own
particular occupation to any such procedure. Accordingly, displeased
with a recent boundary decision, he started along with Salvador to fight
Honduras. Once more the United States and Mexico tendered their good
offices, and again a Central American conflict was closed aboard an
American warship. About the only real achievement of Zelaya was the
signing of a treaty by which Great Britain recognized the complete
sovereignty of Nicaragua over the Mosquito Indians, whose buzzing for a
larger amount of freedom and more tribute had been disturbing unduly the
"repose" of that small nation!

To the eastward the new republic of Cuba was about to be born. Here a
promise of adequate representation in the Spanish Cortes and of a
local legislature had failed to satisfy the aspirations of many of its
inhabitants. The discontent was aggravated by lax and corrupt methods of
administration as well as by financial difficulties. Swarms of Spanish
officials enjoyed large salaries without performing duties of equivalent
value. Not a few of them had come over to enrich themselves at
public expense and under conditions altogether scandalous. On Cuba,
furthermore, was saddled the debt incurred by the Ten Years' War, while
the island continued to be a lucrative market for Spanish goods without
obtaining from Spain a corresponding advantage for its own products.

As the insistence upon a removal of these abuses and upon a grant of
genuine self-government became steadily more c