Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/79



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 49

tributed 4 per cent, to the revenue of the Republic ; and at all times, through the commandants of Partidos, he gave orders what to plant. His success bred a host of irrecon- cileable enemies, who could not forgive one that was more prosperous than themselves. In 1836 appeared myriads of Garrapatas, the Carrapato or Ixiodes of the Brazil, whence it probably came to Paraguay, and the bovine race suffered severely from the Epizootic complaint. The Dictator ordered all the infected to be shot by platoons, and was soundly abused for teaching the world our modern equivalent, the ^' Cattle Disease Preven- tion Act." With a similar rough vigour the King of Yemen resolved to extirpate the dreadful Helcoma by putting to death on a certain day all the sufferers ; and even now the Gallas spear the first cases of small-pox, and burn the huts over the bodies. In 1843 he suppressed the College of Theology with the dictum, '^ Minerva duerme cuando vela Marte," for he was nothing, if not classical. The very fair and impartial book by Messrs. Kengger and Longchamps, " Reign of Dr. Joseph Gaspard Roderick de Rodriguez de Francia in Paraguay" (London, 1827), tells us how the Dictator would not allow an English ship to break bulk until he had mastered sufficient of the language to under- stand her charter. To ridicule such a man is evidently absurd ; the attempt can only recoil upon those who make it. Dictator Francia^s system demanded complete isolation, and thus Paraguay, which had been temporarily thrown open by the Revolution of 1810, became a Darfur, a Waday. Commerce was prohibited, or rather was mono- polized, and sequestration soon annihilated a trade which, during the thirty years ending the last century and ten years of the present, had risen to upwards of $1,500,000 per annum, and employed several thousand hands in 750 ships of sizes, thirty of them exceeding 200 tons.

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