The long and sanguinary conflict which the despotic ruler of this country has been enabled, from various causes, to maintain against the allied arms of Brazil and the other Platine States has naturally excited considerable curiosity in Europe to know something of its past history, people, and form of government.

In order to arrive at a correct judgment in respect of this singular people, and of their political and social condition, it is absolutely necessary to go back to the time when the Jesuits exercised so potential an influence in the River Plate, as in other parts of South America where the members of this remarkable order were permitted to carry out their questionable designs for the religious subjection and social domination of the aboriginal inhabitants.

The Jesuits first arrived in Paraguay at the beginning of the 17th century, when they obtained from Spain the concession of a vast territory of their own choosing, traversed by the Parana and Uruguay rivers, and capable of growing a great variety of products, including the sugar cane, indigo, cotton, tropical fruits of every description, and almost every kind of edible root and vegetable. The forests contained woods of the most valuable character, and the region in question also possessed great mineral wealth. The Fathers, having established themselves in their conceded territory, forthwith set about devising schemes for its population by civilised, or, at least, subjected Indians. The means adopted were characteristic. Azara describes the ingenious, if not very ingenuous, system adopted for this purpose. Having failed in their attempts to subdue the wilder Indian tribes, the Fathers soon directed their efforts to the reduction of the Guaranis, who were of a milder and more tractable temperament. By great industry, and by dint of patience, a small community was formed, over whom the Jesuits possessed the most entire control, and whose members were used for the reduction of savages in much the same fashion as the fowler uses his “call-birds” for the capture of others. The following is a brief description of the method usually adopted:—

They sent to a savage community some small presents by two Indians speaking the same language, and who had been chosen in their oldest communities. They repeated these embassies and presents at different times, the messengers always stating that they were sent by a Jesuit who loved them tenderly, who desired to come and live in their midst, and to procure for them other objects of greater value, including herds of cows, in order that they might have food to eat without exposing themselves to fatigue. The Indians accepted these offers, and the Jesuit started with what he had promised, accompanied by a considerable number of Indians selected from amongst those of their early redacciones. These Indians remained with the Jesuit, as they were needed to build a house for the curate and to take care of the cows. These were very soon destroyed, for the Indians only thought of eating them. The savages asked for more cows and they were brought by additional Indians chosen like the first; and the whole of them remained on the spot, under the pretext of building a church and other edifices, and of cultivating maize, the yucca root, &c., for the Jesuit and for all the others. Food, the affability of the priest, the good conduct of the Indians who had brought the cattle, festivals and music, the absence of every appearance of subjection, attracted to this settlement all the savage Indians in the neighbourhood. When the priest saw that his selected Indians greatly exceeded the savages in numbers, he caused the latter to be surrounded on a determined day by his people, and mildly told them, in a few words, that it was not just their brethren should work for them, that it was therefore necessary they should cultivate the earth and learn trades, and that the women should spin. A few appeared dissatisfied, but they perceived the superiority of the Indians of the curate, and as the latter was careful to caress some and punish others with moderation, while exercising a surveillance over all for a time, the new mission was at length entirely and successfully formed.

The internal government of the Jesuits was quite as peculiar as the proceedings by which they widened their influence and brought the outlaying savage populations under control. From the Indians an unquestioning and absolute submission was exacted, and the hours and the nature of their labours were fixed without appeal by their clerical masters. M. Quentin, in his very interesting work, translated from the French by Mr. Dunlop, thus depicts the interior life in these redaccions, the name given to their establishments by the Jesuits themselves:—

The Indians knew no other authority than that of the Father. The Father fed and clothed them, and promised the joys of Paradise as the reward of their submission and assiduity in labour. They lived in common, they worked in common, they prayed in common, under the direction of the Father, who was the representative of God. The Indian laboured, but nothing belonged to him individually; everything was the property of the whole community. The Father distributed amongst the different families the things necessary for their sustenance, and the remainder was carefully stored and guarded in immense warehouses. The Indians had nothing to do with the traffic; the Father it was who sold in distant markets the precious woods cut in the forests, the Paraguayan tea, the tobacco, and the hides: he it was who brought back fine garments, the most beautiful of which were given to the most docile and submissive, and returned with implements of agriculture, looms for the weaving of cotton, and splendid stuffs for the adornment of the chapel on holidays, when work was suspended and the bells sent forth jubilant peals. These days were days of high festival in the redacciÓn. The Fathers of the neighbouring missions assembled. They invested themselves in copes resplendent with gold; children, clothed in white robes, carried censers, which they waved to and fro; and the whole population, in good order, and to the sound of music, slowly advanced, singing canticles as they went under the shade of the orange trees which fringed their path.

The Indians were, it will be seen, entirely deprived of liberty. They were not allowed to do anything of their own motion. They could engage in no private pursuits, and there was, therefore, wanting every stimulus to individual elevation. A dead level was created, above which none rose save by grace and selection of the priests themselves. But in return for their confiscated freedom of action, the Indians were relieved of all care for the morrow; and otherwise the Jesuit Fathers, it must be confessed, were at pains to make despotism sweet and not bitter. The labour tasks imposed were in no sort onerous, and, as Azara remarks, they were amused “by a great number of balls, fÊtes, and tournaments,” on which occasions the actors were invariably clothed in the most costly and magnificent vestments to be had in Europe. To the aspiring, cultured, exalted spirit slavery in a gilded cage would be simply intolerable; but in the case of the Guarani Indians it was very different. They were slaves, and they were perfectly contented with their slavery.

The Fathers were very careful to prevent their neophytes from acquiring the Spanish language; only a few, who occupied certain subordinate offices, were trusted with this knowledge, for the Fathers were well aware that the only basis on which their system could possibly rest secure was that of universal ignorance. Every channel of information or of communication was in consequence rigorously closed and barricaded by the institution of the most exclusive regulations. Education was summed up in the oral teaching (they were not taught to read or write) of certain church prayers and the ten commandments; and the time not monopolised by labour, or in the childish games provided for their relaxation, was devoted to exercises of piety and worship according to the pompous ritual of the Romish Church.

When, therefore, for reasons and under circumstances which I will not now stay to particularise, the Jesuits were expelled from the River Plate, and were compelled to abandon their missions, the pretentious fabric they had raised, possessing in itself no sustaining power, collapsed almost immediately. The withdrawal of the Fathers was an inexorable call to their former disciples to self-thought and self-action. They were, however, unequal to the demands of the situation; everything fell into disorder, and “villages in ruins, fields untilled, yerbales destroyed, at once demonstrate the grandeur and the fragility of the work undertaken by the learned ambition of the Jesuits.” But the labours of the Fathers were far from fruitless. They had sedulously cultivated amongst the Guarani populations of Paraguay sentiments of obedience and fanaticism, and, incapable of managing their own affairs, they have always reposed their destinies in the hands of some authority, invested with the power, as with the title, of El Supremo.

The history of this people, since the expulsion of the Jesuits, is, therefore, that of a succession of tyrannies. When all the neighbouring countries were engaged in a bloody war for the attainment of their independence no throb for liberty disturbed the popular heart of Paraguay. The Metropolitan supremacy was exposed to no tumultuous assault, and was subverted only when its official guardians betrayed their trust. The nation allowed itself to pass from one master to another, just like a herd of cattle, without protest and without the manifestation of any special interest, but to the new authority as to the old they rendered the same homage of unreasoning and unreflecting obedience. It is true that some forms of popular ratification were given, but only given because they were asked.

I cannot pause to specify the intrigues which resulted in placing Francia in the seat of power. Suffice it to say that in 1817 this terrible man caused himself to be proclaimed Supreme and Perpetual Dictator, and never surely did tyrant exercise absolute rule with a more ruthless and cruel rigour. Even the humblest ceased to find safety in their obscurity. For the most trifling reasons men and women were thrown into prisons and there tortured often to the death. Espionage was general; mutual confidence was destroyed; the members of society “moved as in a desert,” scarcely daring to address their dearest friends lest some thoughtless word might be reported to their detriment.

Francia lived in the most complete seclusion:—

He was as unapproachable as a divinity. Hidden in the recesses of his palace, nobody could penetrate to his presence. He only went out in the evening, and his progress was marked by a solitude. At the moment he quitted his palace the clock of the Cathedral sounded, and all the inhabitants, seized with affright, hastily retreated within doors. If one of them, by chance too late, was encountered by the cortÈge of the Dictator, he cast himself upon his knees, with his face to the earth, never daring to contemplate the features of El Supremo, and awaiting the chastisement he had incurred in an agony of fear. Sometimes he was carried to prison; more frequently he was let off with a few blows with the flat of a sabre, heartily applied by the soldiers of the escort.

Under such a Government neither agricultural nor trading industry could do other than languish, and the country was cut off from all commercial communication with the outer world.

The following extract will show how the Dictator was in the habit of accomplishing his ends:—

Only a few stuffs and clumsy implements were with difficulty produced in the country. But, in times of urgent necessity, the Dictator knew how to improvise workmen and teach them those arts of which they were ignorant. The means he employed are worthy of notice. He required belts for his soldiers: no one could make them. “Having prepared a gallows, he threatened to hang thereon a shoemaker who had failed to fashion the belts according to his desire.” By this process blacksmiths were converted into locksmiths, armourers, and cutlers, shoemakers into saddlers, goldsmiths into founders, and masons into architects. That their zeal might not be permitted to cool, he condemned a blacksmith to penal servitude who had badly constructed the sight-piece of a cannon. Everything was done by rule. The citizens were divested of all power of initiation. If they became proprietors, even their goods were subject to the arbitrary caprices of the Dictator. Under pretext of embellishing the capital, Francia “pulled down several hundred houses without compensating the owners, or troubling himself as to their fate or that of their families. Each was compelled to demolish his own house, and if he lacked the means, convicts were employed to do the work, and afterwards carried away what they thought proper.”

On the 19th of September, 1840, Francia died. But unhappily his death did not prove the dawn of freedom for the Paraguayans. After a brief interregnum Don Carlos Lopez, a lawyer, finally took up the sceptre of his terrible predecessor, and wielded it with a hand equally relentless. He professed, it is true, to rule in conformity with the constitution of 1844, if this name can be given to an act which merely legalised despotism; but if any difference existed between the position of Lopez and Francia, it was simply that the iron rod of the latter was gilded and painted in the grasp of the former.

Without repudiating the exclusive policy of Francia, Lopez the elder permitted some partial commerce with foreign nations. But this licence was hampered by the most absurd restrictions, and he continued to exhibit the greatest dislike for foreigners, upon whom extreme barbarities were inflicted. If the isolation of the state was a little relaxed it was because the “trading” interests of the Dictator would else have suffered:—

The modifications effected in the commercial and economic system were of such a nature as to secure for the State a monopoly in the majority of mercantile transactions. Paraguay was and is a great firm under the management of the President. Lopez authorised the people to work in the yerbales, but it was necessary to ask and obtain a licence. The yerba thus produced was purchased by the State, which exported it on its own account. The Government paid for it five piastres per arroba, and resold it for fifteen in the interior, and for so much as forty piastres to export. In consequence of the monopoly in the sale of this important product, an exorbitant price was maintained, which enabled the Brazilians to give a great development to its production in the province of Parana. The yerba there grown, though of inferior quality, nevertheless found an immense consumption in the Plate, on account of its more moderate price. The utilisation of the forests of Paraguay was also permitted; but the State imposed a duty of 20 per cent.; and as the value was fixed by itself, this pretended liberty of commerce in timber was simply a device to extort money, and ruin the individuals who might engage in it.

With regard to the raising of cattle and the commerce in hides, the State possessed farms and tanneries, and did not allow private persons to offer any serious competition. The State could, in addition, command labourers without payment; for the citizens were still subject, as under the colonial administration, to be pressed into the public service. At every requisition of authority they are bound to work without receiving either reward or nourishment; and it was by means of these auxilios that roads have been made and repaired, churches built, and both the fortress of Humaita and the arsenal of Villa Rica erected. The Guardias Auxiliares—to-day soldiers, to-morrow labourers—are employed in the cultivation of the lands of the State. These soldiers carry the posts, gather the matÉ harvest, and fell timber; but receive no remuneration, being only fed like the rest of the army. These labourers cost so little, that, thanks to them, the State defies all private competition in the produce of its yerbales, forests, and farms.

One thing Don Carlos Lopez did not leave out of sight. He felt his Government was an anomaly and a menace to civilisation and political freedom in the surrounding States, and any day even his so patient subjects might find their bonds too galling for longer endurance. He, therefore, developed the military strength of the Dictatorship, and raised the fortress of Humaita on the banks of the Paraguay in such a position as to render the country all but impregnable to external assault.

At the end of a long reign Lopez I. died, and his dominion went by testament to his son,—Don Francisco Solano—as Vice-President. M. Quentin gives the following account of the proceedings adopted by the present ruler of Paraguay to secure the position he has used to bring ruin upon his unfortunate country:—

Don Carlos Antonio Lopez died on the 10th of September, 1862. On the very same day Don Francisco Solano Lopez assembled the bishop, the supreme judge, and the principal functionaries, and in their presence opened the sealed envelope which contained the testament of his father. In virtue of the law of 1856 Don Francisco Solano Lopez was designated Vice-President, and in that capacity he convoked the Extraordinary Congress.

As under such circumstances it is well to neglect nothing, young Lopez prudently confided the command of the army to his brother, and one of his uncles was already at the head of the clergy. Thus all the avenues to power were guarded.

The Congress assembled under the presidency of Don Solano Lopez. The result of the vote was certain. Every precaution had been well taken. They were about to proceed to the ballot, when a deputy, named Varela, commenced speaking. He began by eulogising General Lopez, and assuring him of his personal esteem and sympathy, reminded Congress of the express terms of the Act of Independence—Paraguay shall never become the patrimony of a family, and concluded with these words:—“I have the most profound respect for General Lopez, but I have sworn to obey the laws of my country. I hesitate between my affection and my conscience.” The moment was a critical one. An unexpected opposition manifested itself, and drew its force from the law, for the first time invoked in the heart of a Congress. Lopez tremblingly witnessed this episode, but retained his coolness and self-possession. He made a sign to Father Roman, the Bishop of Asuncion, who of right formed part of the Congress. The prelate approached Varela, who humbly fell on his knees in the midst of the assembly, and the bishop, placing his hands upon his head, said with a loud voice—“Ego te absolvo; thou art released from thy oath; this is not the case for its observance (no es este el caso de observarlo).” Varela rose with delight, and cried, “Then I will be the first to give my vote to his Excellency General Lopez!” It need not be stated that the President obtained unanimity, and that the people welcomed his new master with transport. The Lopez dynasty was founded.

Lopez II., thus firmly seated in his place of supremacy, adhered to the traditions of his father. His government has been equally despotic, and the same policy of isolation and monopoly has been persistently observed. Public opinion has no existence, and the only paper published in Paraguay is the official organ, edited by the Dictator himself. The commerce and industry of the people—their toil, their means, their blood—are at the uncontrolled disposal of their tyrant. And how this authority has been exercised we all know. Inflamed by ambition, and desirous to extend his power beyond the limits of Paraguay, the greater part of his reign—I use the word advisedly—has been devoted to the steady accumulation of military and naval stores, the organisation of an army out of all proportion to the number of inhabitants, and the erection of strong fortresses on the riverine passages to the interior. For what purpose? Let his acts of gratuitous invasion tell; let the story of the present war with Brazil and her allies testify. I have already placed the facts with respect to this struggle before my readers, and I feel sure they will concur with me that the real object of Lopez was to bring the whole of the River Plate under the terror of a Guarani-Indian subjection. Happily this calamity has not occurred, but it has only been avoided by a prodigious outflow of blood and treasure.