Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/122



92 FROM RIO DE JANEIRO TO MONTE VIDEO.

a time_, create a demand for tallow ; the removal of the tariff and the export duties should make wool pay. " Those wonderful Chinese sheep which have six lambs yearly'^ might, as the guidebook says, be imported, instead of the ewe of six lambings which now satisfies the breeder. Still, how- ever, would remain the necessity of leading a half-savage life; the depressing conviction of being at the mercy of a government which taxes everything exportable â€” wheat, for instance, even before there is any wheat to export â€” and the daily danger of revolution, of battle, of murder, and of sudden death. And if stabbed or shot upon your own threshold, under your own roof-tree, you die without feeling the poor satisfaction that justice will be done to you upon the cowardly assassin who, bloodthirsty as a Shoho Dankali, offers a bowl of milk with one hand and knifes you with the other. In these fair lands the slaughterer of a stranger, even if seized red-handed, is never punished. Moreover, where almost all ^' Gauchos^' are murderers in posse if not in esse, detected or undetected, if the foreigner take a life in the extremity of absolute self-defence, he is visited with the severest penalty of the ridiculous law, or no law. Justice is in abeyance; there is neither the code of the Revolver, nor of Judge Lynch, nor of the Juiz de Paz. And so will the state be, until the afore-mentioned Judge comes to exercise the jus fori throughout the length and breadth of the Confederation.

We made our landfall at Cape Castillos Grande, where ships from Europe bend westward and prepare to enter ^^ the River.^-* We wondered at not finding a lighthouse upon the steep, round, black islet that outlies the low shore. Presently we steamed past the historic Cabo de Santa Maria â€” a strip, however, not a cape â€” where, in the days of Fernandez de Enciso, South America, like Africa in the Ptolemsean age, was shorn of its tail. According to some.