Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/81



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 51

(whose real name by-the-bye was the not euphonious Gou- jand)^ settling on land claimed by Paraguay, began impru- dently to cultivate the monopolized yerba, he was seized by order of the Dictator, and was carried prisoner across the frontier. This act has been held to be a violation of territory — has been called gross as the capture and execution of the Due d'Enghien. Francia, however, justified it, and detained the botanist ten years (1821-1831). For somewhat the same reason the Doctors Rengger and Longchamps enjoyed an obligatory residence of six years.

Yet the Dictator could at times do a generous deed. When (1820) his old and tried enemy, General Artigas, once Captain of Blandengues or horse-militia, and afterwards " Protector and Most Excellent Lord" of the Banda Oriental, was compelled by Ramirez to fly his country, he had recourse to Paraguay, where, by " supreme order,^' a small pension and a safe asylum at Caraguate were assigned to him. The Uruguayan Robin Hood was allowed to end his days in peace (1850) — other petty despots would have sent him at once to the banquillo, the shooting-bench.

At last Paraguay became to the political, travelling, and commercial world a terra incognita^ a place existing only in books and maps; it had been caused to disappear, as it were by a cataclysm, from the surface of the globe.

Dictator Francia excused himself by declaring that he had carefully proportioned liberty to civilization, and he defended his incommunicability by pointing in triumph to the disastrous revolutions and to the fratricidal wars with which federalism and a licence called liberty had dowered the conterminal republics. He could show to the world in the recluse kingdom of the Jesuits, the sole exception to republican anarchy, a tranquil and powerful, a contented if not a happy people j and he could declare bond fide this state of things to be the result of his

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