Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/159



NATIVES AND FOREIGNERS. 129

and after editing tlic River Plate Magazine, he had drifted up, like other ne'er-do-weels, into Paraguay. When Mr. Wasliburn, demanding his passports in high dudgeon, left Asuncion, these two employes were violently and illegally arrested in the streets, put in irons, sent to the army for judgment, and otherwise maltreated, upon the " not proven" charge of having conspired, in company with Colonel Benigno Lopez, Vice-President Sanchez, and others, against the Marshal-President's life.

Mr. Bliss, presently after his detention, published against his employer a pamphlet entitled, ^' Historia Secreta de la Mision del Ciudadano Norte-Americano, Charles Amos Washburne, cerca del Gobierno de la Republica del Para- guay, por el Ciudadano Americano, Traductor Titular (in partibus) de la Mesma Mision, Porter Cornelio Bliss, B.A. ;" and bearing for motto the venerable " Quousque tandem Catalina abutere patientia nostra ?" (Cicero). The unfinished volume, which is vilely printed, extends over 168 pages. It is a mass of undigested nonsense, dragging in Mesdames Harris and Partington, quoting all the languages of Europe, and citing evry poet from Gray to Tennyson ; its sole object is to abuse Mrâ€ž Washburn, describing his "blind spite against the Marshal-President," his '^'^deep libations of cocktails of sherry," and of " sudden deaths" (matados a cinco pasos) ; and finally it crushes him with â€”

" Man being reasonable must get drunk."

This " Anti-Washburnianism" was duly forwarded to all the powers of Europe â€” 1 saw a list of them in the Marshal- President's own writing. Nothing could be more simple, more ostrich-like, than thus to accuse oneself by a document bearing upon its face the signs of compulsion. But the Paraguayans are, like all Indians, an eminently childish race ; when they could not shake their enemies' nerves with

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