Villa Rica has 34,297 inhabitants according to a Paraguayan estimate. Personally I think that this should be cut in two. It is a mile northeast of the depot. At a station named Tebicuary is a sugar mill; at Caballero are the railroad shops.
Scene from Railroad Station at Villa Rica
Paraguari, the anti-bellum terminus of the Central Paraguay Railroad, has, according to the census 11,328 inhabitants, although I am doubtful if its population exceeds five thousand. It is situated in the extreme eastern end of the Pirayu valley. This valley is bound by great basaltic hills, some of which are mountains. Some are conical in shape, but the majority are huge hills, whose tops are great stone outcrops. The floor of the valley is high and a cool breeze is generally blowing. The clover and grain, together with the mountains and the church steeples, remind one of the scenery in Central Europe. Paraguari would be the best situated city in Paraguay for its capital, both from a natural location and from a military point of view. It was the camping ground of the Argentine army under General Belgrano in 1811. Formerly the Jesuits had a large stock ranch here.
The railroad, formerly owned by the government, but now controlled by a Portuguese, had originally a six-foot gauge. The depots in the villages from Paraguari to Asuncion are large and old-fashioned like the pictures of those stations depicted in Harper's Weekly Civil War Scenes. Their mere duplicates to-day are to be seen in some European cities such as those at Caen, Bar-le-Duc, Vicenza, the old station at Strassburg, and in the American cities of Savannah and Macon. The English company which had control of the railroad before this Portuguese got it narrowed the gauge down to the regulation broad gauge standard which is narrower than that of the Central Argentina and several other lines in that republic.
The Republic of Paraguay is divided into twenty districts exclusive of Asuncion. I am giving their names and population together with those of their capitals and their population according to the estimate of 1917 in Héctor F. Decoud's Geografia de la Republica del Paraguay, Asuncion, 1917. The population of these district capitals includes the commune as well as the town, for with the exception of six cities, Asuncion, Villa Rica, Caazapá, Villa Encarnacion, Villa Concepcion, and Villa del Pilar there are no incorporated places in the republic:—
Total population, 828,130 inhabitants exclusive of about 50,000 wild Indians living in the Gran Chaco.
The population of Asuncion has been estimated from 80,000 to 125,000 inhabitants. Personally I think that 100,000 would be more nearly correct. Asuncion of 1918 is an entirely different city from Asuncion in 1913, so great has been the visible improvement. This is largely due to the enlightened ideas of the ex-dictator, Don Eduardo Schaerer, a Swiss by birth, and who has infused European progressiveness into the Paraguayan nation, whose population was rapidly being exterminated by forty-five years of incessant revolutions on top of a five years' war which cost Paraguay five hundred thousand lives. Schaerer has showed that he is the man for the job. His rule has been benign but firm. No sooner had he assumed the executive power than some of his dissatisfied opponents tried the tricks on him that have been tried on other dictators. This time they failed. The bomb that they touched off underneath his residence failed to explode. The conspirators and other suspects were immediately clapped into jail. January 1, 1915, witnessed the close of two years' peace; it was too much of a good thing for the fire-eating populace so they started another revolution. This lasted but one day, the revolutionists losing over three hundred men in a street fight in Asuncion. No more tricks have been tried on Señor Schaerer.