The Chances for Walker.
We have further news from Nicaragua this morning. It goes just far enough to stimulate the hopes of WALKER’S friends without changing the opinions of those who consider his condition desperate. Col. LOCKRIDGE is making desperate efforts to reopen his line of reinforcements, and so far he has gone, has been successful. But his progress is small, and the difficulties of the attempt are but just commencing.
Very little warrant can be found in this news for any decisive or positive opinion as to WALKER’S eventual success. If LOCKRIDGE should force his way to the Lake, and then succeed in procuring boats, WALKER may be relieved; and having maintained himself against the superior numbers of the allies through January and February, without aid or immediate prospect of any, there is no reason why he should not hold out to eventual triumph. The climate is always against him. But that, perhaps, is more than compensated by the character of the enemy he contends with, who are wholly destitute of warlike spirit, and whose rapid escapades from the battlefield are owing to the il-judged exaggerations of WALKER’S ferocity, by which the Central American Governments have sought to excite the hatred of the people.
The stories have acted rather upon their fears than their jealousy and aversion. Cowardice disarms them. Nothing could be more injudicious than to have told this emasculated populace, among whom old traditions life with astonishing tenacity, that the American chief was a flibustier and buccanero. The horrors and atrocities perpetrated upon their fathers by those daring freebooters were so recalled; while to us they recall, how, in the better days of Nicaragua, DAVIS, a buccaneering captain from Jamaica, with only ninety men, penetrated to the capital, ransacked and plundered it, and left with prodigious booty; and how MORGAN, with an army less numerous than WALKER’S, captured the fortified and well-defended town of Porto Bello, and afterwards, following very nearly the track of the Panama Railroad, took, sacked and destroyed the old city of Panama, the seat of the South Sea trade, gorged with immense wealth, and fortified and occupied by a powerful army. Such recollections provoke the most contemptuous estimates of Spanish-American valor; and almost assure the final success of WALKER. But then, achieving his work in haste, and departing, the flibustier of other times had not a pestiferous climate added to the less formidable dangers he overcame. WALKER, by remaining has; and may, therefore, fail.
