Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/15

 fighting at the despot's nod, for the perpetuation of a policy of restraint which a more advanced state of society cannot tolerate, and of an obsolete despotism which the world would willingly abolish.

Those who write have in almost all instances allowed their imaginations and their prejudices to guide their judgment, and mostly they have frankly thrown overboard all impartiality. The few “ Lopezguayos” or “ Paraguayan sympathizers ,” the “ thick and thin supporters” of the Marshal President, make him the “ Liberator of South America;” the “ Cincinnatus of America;” the “ King Leopold of the Plate;” they quote the names applied to him by his subjects, Great White Man (Caraï guazú ) and “ Big Father.”

Paraguay is to them another Poland in the martyrology of peoples, a weak, meek inland Republic to be strangled, after an “odious struggle of three to one,” in the huge coils of the Imperial Anaconda. They accuse the Brazil of the most interested views, they charge her with boundless profligacy and the “ most hideous vices,” as if these had aught to do with the subject; they declare that no nation has a right to impose upon a neighbouring and independent people a government not of its own choice ; they irrelevantly predict terrible crises when the Negro question and that of the great feudal domains shall demand to be settled, and they even abuse “ l'Empire Esclavagiste” because she has not madly freed her slaves, or rather because she has freed them to enslave her free neighbours.* Many there are who term the Marshal President, alias the “ Tyrant of Paraguay,” the “ Monster Lopez,” a “ Vandalic and treacherous aggressor,” a Nero, a Theodore, “ O barbaro do Paraguay :”

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 * " Revue des Deux Mondes," of February 15th, 1865, and August 15th, 1868, by M. Elisée Reclus: November 15th, 1865, by M. J. de Cazane, and September 15th, 1866, by M. Duchesne de Bellecourt. The ignorance of fact paraded in these papers is to be equalled only by the animus which pervades them.