Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/18

 process of annihilation. It is the Nemesis of Faith; the death-throe of a policy bequeathed by Jesuitism to South America; it shows the flood of Time surging over a relic of old world semi-barbarism, a palæzoic humanity. Nor is the semi-barbaric race itself without an especial interest of its own. The Guarani family appears to have had its especial habitat in Paraguay, and thence to have extended its dialects, from the Rio de la Plata to the roots of the Andes, and even to the peoples of the Antilles. The language is now being killed out at the heart, the limbs are being slowly but surely lopped off, and another century will witness its extirpation.

This Crimean Campaign,

abounds in instances of splendid futile devotion. It is a fatal war waged by hundreds against thousands; a battle of Brown Bess and poor old flint muskets against the Spencer and Enfield rifles; of honeycombed carronades, long and short, against Whitworths and Lahittes; of punts and canoes against ironclads. It brings before us an anthropological type which, like the English of a past generation, holds every Paraguayan boy-man equal, single-handed, to at least any half-dozen of his enemies. It is moreover an affair which, whilst testing so severely the gigantic powers of the Brazil and threatening momentous effects to its good genius—democratic imperialism, has yet been prosecuted with so many laches, with an incuriousness, an inconséquence, and in many cases with a venality which, common as are such malpractices in the non-combattant ranks of all semi-disciplined and many disciplined armies, here presents an ethnographical study.

Nor is the subject without its sensational side. These pages will offer details concerning places and persons whose names are more or less familiar to the public ear : Asuncion,