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138 But constitutions and written laws have never been worth much in those parts, except for musket-wadding. The local idea of government was to put yourself in power and then squeeze all the taxes you could out of everybody else. Nobody ever became president of New Granada or Colombia except by violence, and no president was strong enough to keep peace in Panama.

Revolutions, like every other industry, were revived on the Isthmus by the coming of the forty-niners and the building of the railroad. The Spaniards there have always been predatory by choice, and as they had lived off the Indians in the old days, they now lived off the Americans and other travelers. It is the old story of the robber-barons of a trade-route, fighting each other and their equally greedy overlord for the privilege of extorting toll from the traders passing through their territory. Panama in the nineteenth century was still in the Middle Ages. The landward walls of the city were torn down less than fifty years ago, and underground passages still connect the fortress-like, town houses of the haciendados, the rich landowners who used to make revolutions and fight them with armies of peons from their great estates, led by bands of foreign mercenaries or soldiers of fortune. These were the barons, and the overlord was the federal government at Bogotá, which exercised absentee tyranny of the worst kind.

As the Panamanians were not strong enough to win independence, nor the Bogotá government to keep good order, every revolution either degenerated into brigandage, or was stopped by American intervention. For the burden of this disorder fell not so heavily on the