Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ works supplied to the book-trade in an age when Negro Emancipation, Constitutional Government, the rule of the '^ Anglo-Saxon ^^ race, and the mercantile " Civis sum Romanus "'â– ' were rampant. " Dr. Francia^'s Reign of Terror"-' and Letters from Paraguay,'' by the brothers Robertson are still our staple. The brothers were well

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      treated at first, but they imprudently, and perhaps purposely disappointed the Dictator, who, in exchange for his produce, wanted arms and arms only. They fell into disfavour, they prudently left the country, and, arrived in England, they wrote popular books about Paraguay. Hatred made them photograph their foe and produce a manner of biography amusing as that of Boswell. The latter was a fautor of the great master of the English language, the " Majestic Teacher of Moral and Religious Wisdom ; whereas the brothers, while holding up Dr. Francia as a vulgar tyrant to the execration of a civilized and commercial world, invested him with more than usual nobility and grandeur, with the faults of his age and race, and with virtues and merits all his own. Mr. Carlyle {Foreign Quarterly, No. 62, July, 1843), guided only by the light of intelligent despotism, easily under- stood through the running shrieks of constitutionalisms and other humbugs, that Francia was a " true man in a bewildered Guacho (Gaucho) world.""'

      Yet we must be grateful for the popular and respectable volumes of the unsage brothers. We see the Dictator pacing about his ground-floor verandah in a dressing-gown of flowered cotton, deeply pondering, whilst he daintily takes his pinch of " Princeza,"" or smokes his cigarette-like cigar, made for him by the sister who acts as his Ama de Haves (housekeeper) . We hear him thunder forth the bruto, the barbaro, and the favourite " bribonazo " (blundering rascal). We behold him leading his cavalry charges with boyish glee, and we catch him handing out the three economical ball cartridges, with which, more Austriaco, crimi- nals were shot. His outburst against the English importer — so naively quoted, and so telling against the quoter — and his proverb " pan pan y vino vino," light up many a dark page of hysterical Anglomania. He appears as a lawyer strictly honest, as a statesman single-minded, as a patriot

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      unde filed by lucre ; as a judge he spends the day over the smallest details of justice; as a student he reads through the night. Convinced that his Dictatorship is a protest of the Spirit of Order against the Spirit of Anarchy^ and believ- ing that the independence of his beloved country and perhaps his own existence depend upon an imposing military force, he organizes the imitation of a regular army, and after pe- rusing books he drills it liimself. The unwise brothers find in this measure only a pretext to deride his uniform and his word of command. Wishing to improve his capital, he applies vigorously to his self-imposed task of town architect. The Robertsons caricature him using a level. Like Ma- horamed Ali Pasha of Egypt, he is assiduous in his endeavours to establish a system of industry, to add agricul- ture and cattle breeding to the miserable trade in yerba and tobacco that characterized the still and silent shores of the mighty Paraguay. He accepts only a third of the $9000 voted to him by Congress, observing that the State wants more than he does — would the Messrs. Philistine Bull have done likewise?

      Dr. Francia had one pet, the army, and one pet aversion, the Church. He severely disciplined his troops, but only when they were under arms : at other times they were free. Foreseeing probably what wild work Generals and Colonels would do for the Argentine Republic, he raised no officer above the rank of Captain. This precaution has been one of the fatalities of the present war, where the Paraguayan private, essentially unintelligent, looked to his commander and found none. He established in fact a stratocracy which placed the military element above the civil ; every citizen was compelled to doflf his hat to a sentinel. This was anciently the case in the Brazil, and perhaps in all the lands of the neo-Latin races, the soldier on guard being the symbol of his government. Duly weighing the unsatisfactory

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      state of his relations with the Conterminal States^ especially with Buenos Aires, which could at any time have closed his only line of importation, he was eager to lay in that formidable store of arms and ammunition and military appa- ratus, which still accumulated by a second generation, have lasted through a five years^ war. Finally he was steel- cased at all points, and ever ready to fight ; hence, I presume, we even now read of the ^^ peaceful little Republic, Paraguay.^"*

      With regard to the Church he evidently thought with the great Mii'abeau, " Yous ne ferez jamais rien de la Revo- lution si vous ne la dechristianisez pas.^^* He abolished the Inquisition ; he did away with the onerous diezmo or tithes ; he converted the idle monasteries into barracks, and he secularized the valuable gold and silver plate, the doubloons and the other property which lay useless in and around the religious houses and the Misiones. He shaved the heads of oflPending monks " in order to take the glory from their crowns."'^ He wished to be a Catholic, not a Roman Catholic. One of his favourite sayings was — ^' You see what priests are good for ; they make us believe more in the devil than in God." Again he would remark, pro- bably imitating the greatest Corsican, " Be Christians, Jews, or Mussulmans, anything but Atheists."^ The saying was latitudinarian in his day, before Anti-Theism had taken the place of Atheism. Finding that the Bishop of Asun- cion had fallen into a manner of aberration, the result of age and mental sufi'ering. Dictator Francia, determined to be governor spiritual as well as temporal, made him depute his powers to Pai Montiel, " Provisor'^ or Yicar- General. Through the latter he ruled the diocese, and made the Church the handmaid, as she should be, not the mistress of the State ; the moral Police, not the Sovereign. He suppressed night worship and processions, because they certainly led to dis-

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      orders^ and they might lead to conspiracy. Finally, at the time of his death only fifty priests, all aged and mostly decrepit, survived in the land that had once been overrun by them.

      " Por suas ideas religiosas/' says my learned friend Dr. D. Barros Arana, of Santiago de Chile, whose excellent school history of the New World deserves to be naturalized amongst us, " aquel mandatario no parecia nascide i educado en una Colonia espanola.'^ It is not generally known that the Francia family is of Paulista origin, and that the Fran9a e Horta house still exists at S. Paulo. The Dictator's father, Garcia Rodriguez rran9a, was established by the Governor of Paraguay, D. Jaime Sanjust, as Majordomo in the Yaguaron plantation of black tobacco, with which the Spaniards attempted to rival the Brazilians. Bengger declares that his father was born a Frenchman, yet owns that Paraguay believed him to be Portuguese. G. B. Fran9a Castilianized his name, and married in his adopted home. His son, however, never belied his Portuguese origin, or his descent from that noble city which has three times expelled the Jesuits — she will yet do it a fourth time — and which pushed her arms far as the Gaarani language spread, from the Plate river to the Amazons, from the Atlantic to the foot of the Andes. Viewed by this light, the high-minded and self-reliant, the disinterested and far- seeing, the sombre, austere, and ascetic character of Dic- tator Francia, becomes at once intelligible.

      On May 1, 1816, the fourth Congress met at Asuncion and elected Dr. Francia perpetual Dictator of the Republic : he was no longer " Usia-' or " Vuestra Senoria / he became " Excelentisimo'-' and ^' El Supremo — in those times a recognised title. It is now quoted as if a little blas- phemous. The Dictator had attained the ripe age of sixty, when the fixed habits of a life show only a tendency to

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      exaggerate themselves. The national mind had become torpid and paralysed under his reign of rigour,, and thence- forward he became a kind of modern Dionysius. He established a " Chamber of Truth" in which men were questioned. He supported every Creole against any *' old Spaniard/^ and he permitted the latter to marry only Negresses, China girls^ or " Indians." His administration was remarkable for its eternal suspicion^ even after he had slowly but relentlessly degraded all not sufficiently docile functionaries. Arrogating the right to nominate Cabildos, he had raised СКАЧАТЬ