The war had all the grandeur of an ancient epic. The heroism of Paraguay overcame numbers, destiny, and death; she defeated the allies, and, hemmed in by superior forces, still held out under the leadership of Lopez, now transformed into a stern apostle of nationalism. He performed prodigies; he attacked without reserves, and, in a bellicose delirium, shot down those who criticised his actions, and continued the war on a territory dispeopled and steeped in blood. The allies seized Assomption, and Lopez himself fell in battle: the tragic personification of an irreducible people. The first of the Lopez had written to Rosas in 1845, "Paraguay cannot be conquered." The war confirmed this prophecy. In 1870 the Brazilian and Argentine victors found only a decimated country; the cities were deserted, and foreigners had taken possession of the soil; the solemn silence which Francia had dreamed of for his country reigned throughout. The women were accomplishing their funeral rites above unnumbered and innumerable tombs; they dug trenches, and, like Antigone in the Æschylean tragedy, carried in the folds of their mantles the maternal soil that was to cover the dead.
After this war nothing could be more monotonous than Paraguayan life; military presidents and civil presidents have succeeded one another with intervals of anarchy. The spirit of dictatorship is not dead. The intellectuals—Dominguez, Gondra, Baez—deny Lopez and Francia; but new tyrants reign over the midland Republic.
The principle of authority, exacerbated and tenacious, has created modern Paraguay. This nation confirms a law of American history. Dictatorship is the proper government to create internal order, to develop wealth, and to unite inimical castes.
BOOK IV
FORMS OF POLITICAL ANARCHY
Revolution is general in Latin America. There the most civilised nations have been rent by civil wars. But there are a few republics in which these conflicts have been perpetual: such is the case in Central America and the Antilles. It seems as though the tropical climate must favour these disturbances. Assassinations of presidents, battles in the cities, collisions between factions and castes, inflammatory and deceptive rhetoric, all lead one to suppose that these equatorial regions are inimical to peace and organisation.
There are two South American peoples in which Jacobinism has become a national malady, in which men of every creed are involved: they are Colombia and Ecuador. Their tragic history shows us a curious form of Ibero-American anarchy: namely, religious anarchy.