141 FOREIGN INFLUENCES. Book I. 
of the principal motives by which certain foreign influences 
were actuated in promoting the revolutionary outbreak of 
1851 in Nicaragua. To frustrate the endeavours of the 
Accessory Transit Company — that metamorphosis of the 
Atlantic and Pacific Ship Canal Company of New York — 
was another motive of almost equal weight with the same 
foreign influences. Both motives, by the peculiar turn 
which things had taken in Nicaragua, came into conflict 
with each other ; the federalists of Leon being precisely 
that of the two Nicaraguan parties which was opposed to 
the new contract demanded by the Accessory Transit 
Company. But before I enter on a few explanatory 
remarks with reference to this view of the matter, I have 
to add some facts of interest by which the history of that 
last attempt to form a Central American nationality is 
brought down to the moment when I left Nicaragua— the 
more so as these facts seem to have remained unnoticed in 
some political transactions of a more general significance. 
To Mr. Guerrero, one of the members of the then existing 
federal government, I am indebted for the original docu- 
ments of which the following statements are an abstract. 
The federal, or, as it was called, the national govern- 
ment, with Mr. Barrundia at its head, was installed on the 
9th of January, 1851, and the fact communicated to the 
political agents of all foreign powers represented in any of 
the Central American States. By the n^w federal com- 
pact the three States of the confederation had given up 
the right of entertaining separate intercourse with foreign 
powers, all diplomatic relation having been ceded to the 
national government. The three States of the confedera- 
tion, accordingly, broke off their diplomatic intercourse. 
By the State of Nicaragua, in particular, this was done by 
a decree of its legislative assembly dated the 31st of May, 
