“Full
Of tyrants, and the veriest peasant lad
Becomes Marcellus in the strife of parties.”[21]
And there was the consequent stagnation of business and paralysis of industry of every kind, and the destruction of property on a scale that seems incredible. Such has been the fate of Venezuela since the time of Bolivar, whom its people hail as the Liberator, as the Washington of South America.
But pitiful as has been the country’s lot, unfortunate as it is to-day, the future is not without hope. Only one thing is necessary to change the present lamentable condition of affairs, and convert Venezuela into a great and happy country. That one thing is a man—a ruler of strong arm and stout heart, who is a patriot in deed as well as in name; a president who, forgetful of self, will devote himself entirely to the development of the country’s resources and to the happiness of his people; a statesman, who will be intelligent enough and forceful enough to bring order out of chaos, and give to a long-suffering people those blessings of civilization which, for generations past, they have known only by name.[22]
The task is difficult, very difficult, but it is not impossible. It is only a few decades ago since Mexico was as turbulent a country and as noted for pronunciamentos and revolutions as Venezuela is to-day. Lawlessness was rampant, credit was gone, commerce languished and the only railroad was a short one extending from Vera Cruz to the national capital. Within a single generation this has been all changed, and through the efforts of one man—Porfirio Diaz. Under his wise and beneficent guidance, Mexico has emerged from that state of confusion and anarchy from which she had so long suffered, and now occupies an honored position among the nations of the world. Give Venezuela a statesman and a patriot of the stamp of Garcia Moreno or of Diaz, or of our own Roosevelt, and she, too, from being a comparative waste, will be made to bloom as the rose, and, from being a byword among the peoples of the earth, will be enabled to attain to that commercial and economic eminence which is hers by nature and manifest destiny.
[1] Sr. Pérez Triana, the son of a former president of Colombia, was in 1893 obliged to flee from his country, and as the seaports were watched he and his companions were forced to escape by way of the Meta and the Orinoco. He tells us in his charming book, De Bogotá al Atlantico, p. 3, of the dread inspired by the thought of “lo incierto del viaje, que emprendiamos hacia regiones desconocidas, acaso nunca holladas par la planta del hombre civilizado,” “the uncertainty of the journey we were undertaking to unknown regions, probably never trod by the foot of civilized man.”—Segunda Edición, Madrid, 1905.
Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his introduction to this book, remarks that “The voyage in itself was memorable because, since the first conquerors went down the river with the faith that in their case, if rightly used, might have smoothed out all the mountain ranges in the world, no one, except a stray adventurer, or india-rubber trader, has followed in their footsteps,” p. 13, English edition, London, 1902.
Another Colombian, Sr. Modesto Garces, had made the same journey eight years before, a record of which he has given us in his little work, Un viaje á Venezuela, Bogotá, 1890. But neither he nor Sir Pérez Triana saw the lower Meta, for they left this river a short distance above Orocué, and voyaged to the Orinoco by way of the Vichada.