These criticisms prove that General Diaz has not applied the British methods of preparation for self-government by means of a firm tutelage. Those who condemn his long autocracy say that he enervated men's minds by means of terror, and has accentuated the Aztec gloom by a narrow and monotonous absolutism. Dictatorships are not societies of freemen; they give humanity uniformity and servility. In abandoning the supreme power after establishing order and peace, by presiding as moral authority over the free development of republican institutions, Porfirio Diaz, like Don Pedro in Brazil, might have been the supreme educator of the democracy.

He governed with the aid of the "scientific" party—a group which believes in the virtue and power of science, exiles theology and metaphysics, denies mystery, and confesses utilitarianism as its practice and positivism as its doctrine. The Mexican politicians, in renouncing Catholicism after the Reformation and the passing of the Jacobin laws, have not abandoned dogma and absolutism in doctrine and in life. As in modern Brazil, positivism in becoming the official doctrine. The heirs of Juarez are slowly returning to Catholicism; they aspire to definite certitudes; they have their "Syllabus." In the President political majesty and the religious pontificate were united, as in the Muscovite Czars and the Spanish kings.

In the restoration of the colonial order Juarez and Lerdo de Tejada attracted European capital, for the Yankee supremacy troubled them. Against this policy, which was based on racial interests, General Diaz protected North American capital; bankers and adventurers invaded the country, dominated its industries, and built railways. How check the fatal current which brings the all-conquering gold from the North? The national transformation is the work of the magnates of Wall Street; Mexico is becoming a "zone of influence" for the United States.

GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ. President of Mexico (1876-1880 and 1884-1909).
GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ.
President of Mexico (1876-1880 and 1884-1909).

The scientific party, intoxicated by an orgy of utilitarianism, has not sought to arrest the great plutocracy of the North by means of European alliances.

Unity, wealth, peace: these are the magnificent features of modern Mexico, the admirable work of the Dictatorship. The Yankee peril; lay dogmas which fetter intellectual evolution; a level of utilitarian mediocrity without ideals of expansion, without culture, without the true Latin characteristics; popular ignorance and fresh revolutions: these are the disturbing aspects of this long period of tutelage. If the country triumphs over the obscure agents of dissolution, the influence of Porfirio Diaz will be as durable as that of Pedro II. or Portales or Rosas.

[1] Memoires autographes, Paris, 1824, p. 28.

[2] The brilliant Mexican historian Bulnes states that French intervention was "the revolt of Napoleon III. against the Monroe doctrine" (El verdadero Juarez, Mexico, 1904, p. 816).

[3] Bulnes, ibid., p. 101.

[4] Diaz pacified Mexico by means of the weapon employed by Rosas—fear. Bandits and revolutionaries were shot. His victims are said to have numbered 11,000.

CHAPTER II

CHILI: A REPUBLIC OF THE ANGLO-SAXON TYPE

Portales and the oligarchy—The ten-years Presidency—Montt and his influence—Balmaceda the Reformer.

In Chili the course of political evolution has been entirely original. Her first years of republican life were as troublous as those of the Argentine, Bolivia, and Peru; it was an age of anarchy. Carrera, the dictator, overthrew four governments; there were mutinies in the barracks, and quarrels among the generals; the Dictator O'Higgins fell in 1823; a junta followed him, and after the junta four governors, Freire, Blanco Encalada, Eyzaguirre, and Vicuña—ephemeral figures which a turbulent democracy set up and destroyed. They occupied the centre of the moving scene for some few months, and were seen no more. During the administration of Pinto, from 1827 to 1829, there were no less than five revolutions. Federation was attempted in a country essentially Unitarian; the Congresses were disruptive assemblies; and in 1828 and 1829 an obscure demagogy rose in revolt against the guardians of social order. The national life was chaotic: vandalism in the country, commerce paralysed, industry at a standstill, finance in disorder, credit vanished, and politics revolutionary. The parties were struggling for power; the "old wigs," pelucones, or conservatives, and the "white-beaks," pipiolos, or liberals. The latter governed a people in love with liberty. The political orgy continued until 1830; the Chilian people went from liberty to licence, and from licence to barbarism. At last the demagogy was checked by a man of superior powers, Diego Portales, founder of the Araucanian nation.

THE CATHEDRAL, SANTIAGO, CHILE. (From "Latin America, the Land of Opportunity" by the Hon. John Barrett.)
THE CATHEDRAL, SANTIAGO, CHILE.
(From "Latin America, the Land of Opportunity"
by the Hon. John Barrett.)

With these strong conservative elements, Portales constructed an austere nation. He was born in 1793, and was thirty-seven years old at the time of his first intervention in political life. He was a "new" man, a merchant, with precise ideas. He had the suggestive power of the caudillos, a concrete intelligence, a moderate education, a strong will, some power of reflection and authority. He might well become the leader of a race that knew nothing of lyric enthusiasms nor enticing dreams—the sensible director of a practical people. Minister under Ovalle in 1830, he profited by the victory of General Prieto over the pipiolos. His conservative, authoritative ideas carried him into power. He never wished to be President, but a powerful minister, like Disraeli or Bismarck. Three or four simple and concrete ideas guided him in politics; in the first place, the organisation of Chili against anarchy. Religion is one of the forces of order, and Portales, like Garcia-Moreno, utilised it without going so far as theocracy; the principle of authority is necessary in order to organise a country, and the leader of the pelucones demanded a strong executive with extraordinary faculties. Between two excesses—autocracy and demagogy—he inclined rather toward the former, and became a minister-dictator.

Portales governed against disorder; he dismissed the revolutionary leaders, and men he divided into good and bad. He surrounded himself with "good" men: they were, naturally, conservatives. He hated sargentadas (barrack mutinies); he educated the soldiers, and founded a national guard as a counter-check to militarism. He destroyed the bandits who infested the country. Primary and normal schools were opened, in which he favoured religious instruction. A severe economy was introduced into the national finances. His work was given legal and economic form by a Peruvian jurist, Juan Egana, and a Minister of Finance, Tocornal.

The minister wished his work to share the majesty of things eternal; his personal and passing influence on life was not enough to satisfy him. He had thoughts of a statute, an inflexible mould for the future. The Constitution of 1833, which others promulgated under his sovereign ægis, so to speak, was his political legacy.

This Constitution created a conservative Senate and a strong Executive; the first was to defend tradition, the second to direct the progress of the nation. The provincial assemblies, vestiges of federalism, were suppressed, and the municipalities were entrusted with the public services. In case of internal trouble, the President could declare a state of siege and suspend the constitutional guarantees; but he could neither judge nor apply penalties. The departments elected the deputies; a limited suffrage appointed the senators; their mandate was for nine years. Patronage was organised, and the Church became a State institution, for it defended property, order, and the "good ideas" of the pelucones: it consecrated the oligarchy, pure and simple.

This Constitution explains the slow progress of Chili in matters of liberalism, her long domestic peace, and the lasting hegemony of an oligarchic group. Alberdi attributed the Chilian peace to "a vigorous Executive" and the Constitution of 1833.

This statute once a reality, Portales quietly organised the country; he imposed order "by reason or by force." He retired from power, and, in consequence, the conservative party passed through a crisis, during which Rengijo and Tocornal were in conflict; but Portales reappeared, as Minister of War, under Prieto, and Tocornal, the eminent financier, was at his side. The caudillo of order resumed his work of organisation with incomparable activity; his patriotic ambition was not satisfied by his triumphs over intestine quarrels. He realised that Chili was a maritime nation, commercial and oligarchical, like Carthage, and he aspired to the domination of the ocean.

In the north, under the leadership of Santa-Cruz, Peru and Bolivia had united. Portales feared this confederation, intervened in the affairs of Peru, sent two expeditions against Santa-Cruz, and fomented anarchy in Peru. He destroyed the great work of the great Bolivian cacique, and for half a century his imperialism made progress. Peru had wealth, brilliance, and tradition; Chili deprived her of the hegemony of the Pacific in a four-years war (1879-84).

The work of Portales was considerable. He established peace in the interior, and excited the ambition to rule; he organised the country under a strong authority, aided by a tutelary Church; he fostered wealth and material progress; he built highways and railroads. A Constitution was to establish his moral dictatorship for a period of fifty years. The liberals themselves—Lastarria, Huneeus Gana—recognised his masterly action in a time of disorder. A conservative, Walker Martinez, wrote a brilliant apologia for his work. Vicuña Mackenna, the historian, wrote that "he was rather a great mind than a great character," though his life's work, from the repression of anarchy to the Peruvian war, proves plainly that he was rather a great character than a great mind. Portales died in 1833 by the hand of an assassin.

Manuel Montt continued his political work. His minister, Antonio Varas, assisted him, as Tocornal had assisted the leader of the pelucones. These conservative minds began to govern in 1851, and the re-election of Montt in 1856 prolonged their term of action; this was the "Decenniate," a period of bloodstained autocracy. The Monttvarists became a national party; they defended order to the death, by violence and dictatorship, first of all against the radicals, and later against the radicals and the pelucones. These ten years of disastrous organisation divided two periods: the conservative period of Prieto and Portales, and the liberal period of Perez and Errazuriz.

A liberalism better defined than that of the pipiolos was causing the champions of order some uneasiness. The eloquence of a tribune, Matta, the patriarch of radicalism, the propaganda of Bilbao and Lastarria, and the work of revolutionary clubs, such as the "Society of Equality," formed a party of romantic youth eager to sacrifice itself for its ideals. Montt and Varas opposed it, and exiled or condemned to death the future liberals—Santa-Maria, Vicuña Mackenna, &c. They considered that Chili was not yet sufficiently prepared for the theoretical liberties upheld by Lastarria and Bilbao; they sought to promote education of the British type, with a view to liberty and self-government. They were the representative personages of the Creole oligarchy, a powerful conservative force, rude and beneficent. Dictatorial repression did not destroy liberalism; the presidents of the future were to be liberals, and Montt himself slowly changed the direction of his policy. In 1858, in the last years of the decenniate, the pelucones attacked him because he tolerated the Protestant religion in Valparaiso.

Under the Monttvarist government, as under the dictatorship of Guzman-Blanco and Garcia-Moreno, the country progressed in an economic sense. Railways, highroads, and telegraph lines were constructed. Montt fostered agriculture and the colonisation of the soil in the south by means of credit banks; he opened nearly five hundred schools, and also founded a national bank. Maritime commerce increased, and the public revenue was doubled during the Decenniate; finally, the admirable civil code of Andres Bello, promulgated in 1857, gave discipline and stability to the civil life of the country. Portales, Bello, Montt, and Varas organised Chili both politically and socially.

After Montt, the presidencies of Perez, in 1861, of Errazuriz, in 1871, and of Santa Maria, in 1881, modified the conservative tendencies of the country. All the conquests of the liberals—the civil register, civil marriage, religious toleration—became laws of the State. Liberalism has not lessened the presidential authority. Perez, like Montt, ruled for ten years. Long autocracies and conservative constitutions explain the strength of Chili amid the anarchy of South America.

Portales was the organising genius; Montt represented an epoch of social defence; Balmaceda was the democratic reformer in an oligarchic country, a liberal president in a time of conservative traditions. Balmaceda is the greatest Chilian figure after Portales; his presidency excited a revolution, and transformed the political life of his people.

José Manuel Balmaceda belonged to the Chilian oligarchy. He was descended from a very old colonial family. Juan de Balmaceda was president of the Real Audienca, the king's tribunal, towards the end of the eighteenth century. The name of the family reveals its Basque origin. Balmaceda was born in Santiago in 1838. His father, Don Manuel José Balmaceda, was a conservative, the possessor of vast latifundia, as the head of a traditional family.

Balmaceda adopted democratic ideas. "Apostate" the conservatives called him, forgetting that he had changed his doctrines, but had not abandoned his original mysticism; he believed in liberty as he had previously believed in the inflexible dogmas of the conservatives. He belonged to the Reform Club of Santiago, in which a brilliant younger generation upheld all the liberal idelas and romantic faiths of 1848, the antitheses of the ideas of the pelucones and the Monttvarists. To the despotic executive he opposed electoral liberty, a single-term presidency, autonomous municipalities, and the restriction of presidential powers; to the Catholic oligarchy, religious tolerance; to the traditions of authority, the formal recognition of the rights of the press and the rights of assembly, meeting and petition; to the confusion of the powers of the State, their independence. Balmaceda was the president of the Reform Club. He did not attack the position of a traditional group with plebeian fervour, as the avenger of an age of servitude; he left their ranks, rich and patrician, to condemn their authority and their privileges. It is the attitude of Winston Churchill in liberal England.

Balmaceda had powerful tools at his disposal: personal wealth, the basis of independence, a sympathetic creed, and a party which had been growing powerful under the governments of Perez and Errazuriz.

We may distinguish three phases in his political action: as a deputy he championed the laws of reform; as Minister of Foreign Affairs he prevented the intervention of the United States in the Pacific war; as President he increased the presidential power against the tyranny of Congress. From 1870 to 1879 he was an impassioned parliamentarian, believing in the efficacy of liberty against the excesses of the conservative régime. In the Chamber, as deputy and as Minister of the Interior and Religions, he supported the legal measures of the liberals: secular burial, civil register and marriage, and liberty of worship. In place of an absolute separation of Church and State—not to be realised in Chili—he proposed the union of the two powers on the basis of the traditional "patronage" and religious liberty. He desired no radical reforms. "Let us renounce," he said, "the idea of accomplishing everything in a short space of time; let us beware of carrying our solutions, guided by a spirit of rigorous abstraction, beyond what is required by the actual needs of the moment for the correct application of liberal doctrine and for the common happiness." Balmaceda, a radical in 1879, moderated his ambitions ten years later, when he came to ask the Chilian Parliament to pass his reforms.

Minister of Foreign Affairs under Santa-Maria in 1881, he consolidated the victories of Chili in the war of the Pacific. The military campaign was over, and Peru was vanquished, but was defending her territorial integrity against the conquering ambition of Arauco. What the armies had not been able to do diplomacy hoped to effect. The intervention of the United States would have proposed, as the solution of the war, peace without conquest; this was the policy of Mr. Blaine, who dreamed of an America at lasting peace under the golden reign of arbitration. A North American minister, Mr. Trescott, brought the proposals of his government to Chili. Garcia-Calderon, President of Peru, the champion of territorial integrity and national union, stimulated the intervention of the United States, but the mediators were inclined to treat the victors with docility. President Garfield died, and the North American policy changed. The Peruvian President was a prisoner of Chili; from Rancagua to Quillota, from Santiago to Valparaiso, he was the irreducible symbol of vanquished Peru. The United States abandoned him; their policy finally became indecisive, turbid, Machiavellic. Lima and Callao were occupied until 1883, when Balmaceda succeeded in arranging the terms of peace, and the treaty was signed which delivered over to Chili the riches of Southern Peru.

JOSE MANUEL BALMACEDA. President of Chile (1886-1891).
JOSE MANUEL BALMACEDA.
President of Chile (1886-1891).

Materially, he transformed Chili; morally, he presided over her dissolution, or, at least, her decadence. Neither this degeneration nor this progress was the exclusive work of the autocratic President. Wealth enervates a sober people; it permits the erection of monuments, but it weakens men's characters. Honest and far-sighted, Balmaceda employed the millions he had drawn from the war in material enterprises; he built schools throughout the country, special institutes, mining and agricultural colleges, professional colleges; he began the construction of new railways, of a breakwater at Talcahuano, of palaces for the administrative services; he fortified several ports, bought new ironclads, encouraged immigration, founded military schools, and re-equipped the army. He suppressed contributions, assured the service of the foreign debt, amortised paper money, and demanded guarantees of the banks. When in Chili you inquire as to the origin of a public works, a school, or a prison, you will hear of Balmaceda. In finance, in education, and in colonisation he effected a fundamental renaissance; he was the master-builder among Presidents.

Balmaceda was raised to the presidency by three parties: the liberals, the radicals, and the nationals; that is to say, by three aspects of one central idea, varying from an attenuated liberalism which verged on conservatism in its ideas (nationalism) to a violent liberalism, verging on demagogy (radicalism). The Balmacedist victory stifled all attempts at clerical reaction; Balmaceda was a reformer. His ambition could not be satisfied by material progress and practical advance. As ideologist, he applied abstract ideas to politics. He wished to unite all the liberals in one preponderant party, to ensure a still greater independence to the public powers, judicial and municipal, and to despoil the executive of its traditional attributes; to found an educated, liberal, military, and virile democracy as a check against the oligarchy, in which democracy dreamers of every school could find their Utopia.

Between his character and his doctrines there was a grave discrepancy. An autocrat by vocation and by temperament, because a patrician, he nevertheless weakened the executive by the Municipal Law, which established autonomous municipalities, and by the law of incompatibilities, which conceded to Congress a complete independence of the other powers. "The mandate of the deputy" declares this law "is incompatible with the exercise of any paid public function." At this hour of party confusion Balmaceda despoiled the executive of efficacious agents in Parliament. He was thus, by a reform which, ideally speaking, was perfect, preparing the way for serious future conflicts.

The liberal President condemned the Constitution of 1833, the basis of Chilian order; he believed that the new period demanded a new statute. "Neither the desires of the country nor those of the parties or groups now active," he wrote, "can adapt themselves to the system of centralisation and authority consecrated by the Constitution of 1833."[1] He criticised "the attributions which devolve upon the chief of the Executive Power, the weakening of initiative and of the local charters by excess of vigour in the central power; the part played by the Executive in the formation of the judicial power, its influence upon the elections, the functioning of the legislative power, the centralisation of the administration, and the works which foster material progress."

But by abandoning, by a sort of heroic suicide, the forces conferred upon him by a traditional statute, Balmaceda paved the way for an omnipotent Congress. Pelucon by heredity, a cultured despot, he soon disregarded the power which he himself had raised above the decadent presidency. The contradiction between his life and his doctrines, his heredity and his ideals, gives his noble and patrician figure the majesty of a character of Æschylus, ennobled at once and annihilated by destiny. Balmaceda weakened the executive and put forward official candidates; established the preponderance of Congress and wished to have independent ministers; destroyed the Constitution of 1833 and ruled as an autocrat. Renan compared himself to the scholastic hircocerf, which bears within itself two hostile natures; this was also the fate of Balmaceda.

His political ideal was that of Benjamin Constant; of Lamartine, of Laboulaye. He accepted neither the despotism of the President nor the tyranny of Congress.

Could the perfect equilibrium of the public powers be realised in Chili, or was it merely the noble dream of an ideologist? Very soon the omnipotence of a centralised government was replaced by the dictatorship of anarchical Parliaments. The parties imposed ministers upon Balmaceda, and presented him with lists of candidates, among whom the President, powerless to refuse, was to choose his counsellors.

It was a radical transformation, for from the time of Portales the government had intervened in elections, had insisted upon presidents and deputies. Balmaceda disregarded his own work, rebelled against Congress, governed without a budget, defended the rights of the power which he had destroyed by short-sighted legislation, and tried to enforce his wishes as to the Presidency, in the traditional manner, and Congress refused to accept his candidate. It has been truly said that the government of Balmaceda was the crisis of electoral intervention.[2] Parliament refused to pass the President's law of contributions, overturned his ministries, and protested against the designation of an official candidate; as in the time of the French Revolution, a revolutionary committee was formed in the heart of the Chamber. The two dictatorships clashed. The revolution broke forth in 1891; the fleet revolted; civil war divided families; Congress fought for the Constitution, the Government for the autocracy. From La Moneda Balmaceda directed a terrible war against the combined forces of the fleet, the banks, and the Parliament. The factions fought with lamentable ardour; it was a war of hatreds and reprisals, bitter as a racial conflict. Two battles, Concon and La Placilla, destroyed the power of the President.

The revolutionaries got the upper hand, invaded Valparaiso and Santiago, and the Araucanian savages burned the dwellings of the President's friends, and swept, brutal and drunken, through the silent cities. Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine Legation, and his supporters hid, while a horde of vandals proceeded to reduce the capital to ruins. The defeated President took on a stoic grandeur; like a hero of Plutarch, he transformed his fall into an apotheosis; he purified the local tragedy by catastrophe. Serene as a figure of antiquity, he committed suicide, after drafting a noble political testament. "Among those who are to-day my most violent persecutors," he wrote, "are the politicians of various parties whom I have heaped with honours, whom I have exalted and served with enthusiasm. I am in nowise surprised, neither by this inconsequence, nor by the inconstancy of mankind.... All the founders of South American independence have died in dungeons, in prison cells, or have been assassinated, or have perished in proscription and exile. Such has been civil war in the ancient as in the modern democracies. It is only when one has witnessed the fury to which the victors in a civil war abandon themselves that one comes to understand why, of old, the vanquished politician, even though he were the most unworthy servant of the State, made an end by falling upon his own sword."

After these considerations of political philosophy, the firm protestation of the hidalgo. He cannot submit to "the criterion of judges whom he dismissed from their posts on account of their revolutionary ideas." Two ways remained open to him: flight or death, and he preferred the second, for it might lessen the persecution and the woes to be endured by his friends. "I might still escape," he says in his testament, "by leaving Chili, but this expedient would not be consistent with my antecedents, nor my pride as a Chilian and a gentleman. I am inevitably delivered over to the judgment or the pity of my enemies, since the Constitution and the laws have no longer any virtue. But you know, gentlemen (he is addressing Claudio Vicuña and Julio Banados-Espinosa) that I am incapable of imploring favour, or even benevolence, of men whom I despise for their ambition and their lack of citizenship." He felt that a great crisis, or a drama, requires a protagonist or a victim, and he accepted his destiny to the death. Above the half-breed caudillos, above the obscure crowd who swarm in palaces and parliaments, hungering for power and display, rises this patrician figure, towering and solitary.

In his political testament he condemns the existing system: "As long as parliamentary government, as men have wished to practise it, and as the triumphant revolution will uphold it, shall continue in Chili, there will be no electoral liberty, no serious and permanent organisation within the parties, nor peace between the groups in Congress." His bitter prophecy is accomplished: an excessive and sterile parliamentarism triumphed with the revolutionaries. From Portales to Balmaceda the President was the supreme authority; after Balmaceda Congress governed, and the President, the slave of the ruling groups, could neither dissolve Parliament nor appeal to a popular referendum. The liberty of the vote has been won, but it ratifies the tyranny of the Assemblies. The parties are fractional; authority, the basis of Chilian greatness, has declined. A President without initiative, an incoherent ministry, a Parliament divided and uncertain: there is the political outlook. "The Government of Congress is the Government of the parties, and these political entities exist in Chili only in the shape of antipathies or memories."[3]

The Balmacedist party itself did not escape the universal dissolution. It still supports the presidential system, but it does so without the rigidity of its founder; it is liberal, democratic, and parliamentary; its strength lies in the assemblies. "In liberalism," Don Julio Zegers can write,[4] "the Balmacedists are those who prefer Unitarian pacts to doctrines."

In the political world the tradition of the pelucones, of a strong tutelary authority, is dying; in the social world the oligarchy is losing its ancient privileges before the progress of the middle classes. Balmaceda, the founder of schools and colleges, the champion of all liberties, realised this national transformation. Chili was the scene, after the political revolution of 1891, of a social revolution, a warfare of castes, a bloody conflict between the feudal overlords and a Third Estate formed in the schools, liberal and industrial. Two parties, radicals and democrats, are organising themselves for the battles of the future. "The radical party," writes an observer, "is composed of the fervent enemies of the clergy and a great part of the youth of the middle class, which combines with its religious hatreds a certain degree of dislike of the wealthy and respected classes."[5] Señor Edwards believes that this socialistic tendency, which is predominant among the radicals, "constitutes a serious danger for the future." The democratic party, like the English labour party, and the united socialists of France, is a working man's party.

The revolution of 1891 was directed by the bankers. After the war of the Pacific the Chilian oligarchy was dissolved; it formed itself into a plutocracy, without austere traditions, which is predominant in the Parliaments and is ambitious to seize the reins of government. Balmaceda would never give way before the "new men"; as an aristocrat he was the enemy of the merchants. Portales founded a society of patricians, but the liberal president could not organise the democracy he dreamed of. The financiers united with the great families before the threat of formidable strikes, and the intellectual elevation of the middle class, bankers and landowners and property owners grouped themselves in a more accessible oligarchy, much after the pattern of the oligarchy of the United States. Balmaceda was the last representative of the great Chilian tradition, of the tutelary oligarchy which led and educated the people and distrusted the plutocracy.

[1] See J. Bañados Espinosa, Balmaceda, su gobierno y la revolucion de 1891, vol. i. pp. 455 et seq.

[2] Said by Don Juan Enrique Tocornal, a Chilian politician.

[3] Alberto Edwards, Bosquejo historico de los partidos politicos chilenos, Santiago, 1903, p. 116.

[4] Cited by Vicuña-Subercasseaux in his study of Balmaceda. See Gobernantes y Literatos, Santiago, 1907, p. 64.

[5] Edwards, as cited.

CHAPTER III

BRAZIL: THE EMPIRE—THE REPUBLIC

The influence of the Imperial régime—A transatlantic Marcus-Aurelius, Dom Pedro II.—The Federal Republic.

While the republics of America have passed, without prudent transition, from colonial dependence to self-government, Brazil, by means of paternal autocracies, was prepared for the ultimate realisation of its republican dreams. There liberty was not the immediate gift of unrealisable constitutions, but the logical end of a painful conquest. Brazil was successively a tributary colony, an independent monarchy, an absolutist empire, and a federal and democratic republic. One principle, that of authority, was dominant throughout this process of evolution. A rigid despotism gradually ceded secular prerogatives before the attacks of an ardent liberalism; progress was definite and order lasting, and revolution has been powerless to shake the principle of monarchical continuity.

Portugal has not yet been invaded by the French armies. The royal family, carrying the monarchical penates, have fled toward their distant colony, the idyllic and tropical Brazil. We are in 1807: Maria, Queen of Portugal, is insane; João de Braganza, the regent, placid and undecided, hopes for a bourgeois ostracism, without political convulsions.

In Brazil, the monarch, guided by conservative spirits, transforms the economic system and decrees the freedom of the ports, and the metropolitan monopoly is thereby abolished. England, watching over the exodus of the king, demands protection for her products. The factories which a policy of lamentable rivalities had closed are reopened. As early as 1808 the king wishes to found an empire in this colony, devoid as it is of political personality; in 1815 he raises it to the category of kingdom, thus laying the foundations of nationality. Independence, after this, will only be the natural segregation of an organism already formed.

The government of the Portuguese king develops all the national forces which were embryonic in the colony—art, law, literature. He founds the Bank of Brazil, establishes a military academy, a national library, and a botanic garden; he fosters agriculture and immigration. His new domain seems to have transformed the mediocre monarch. Under the influence of his queen, Charlotte, eager for power and display, he longs to extend his dominion over Uruguay and Paraguay, perhaps even to reconstitute, to his own profit, the vice-kingdom of La Plata. He seizes upon French Guiana, which remains in the power of Brazil until 1817.

But such vast plans as these do not strengthen the hands of the monarch. The Court, silent and extravagant, does not please the Brazilians, and the King favours the Portuguese merchants by an extreme prodigality. He creates a new nobility, that of the "sons of the King," and its influence in the palace and its insolent display soon weary the colonists. The old régime is still extant; a parasitical bureaucracy, recruited among the Portuguese, weighs heavily on the destinies of Brazil.

A revolution in Portugal in 1820 invites the King to return to Europe to accept the Constitution put forward by the revolutionary junta of Lisbon. The monarch leaves his son, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, in Brazil, and quits the country. It is said that on bidding Dom Pedro farewell he cried: "Before long Brazil will separate from Portugal; if it is so, crown yourself before some adventurer gets hold of the sceptre."

The Lisbon Parliament wished to destroy the reforms of João VI. in Brazil, and to transform a monarchical nation into a feudal colony, but the Brazilian deputies then in Portugal protested and emigrated to England. A revolution at Pernambuco in 1817 had raised the standard of nationalism. The manifesto or Preciso of the revolutionaries formulated the complaints of the colony. "There is no longer any distinction," said the victorious patriots, "between Brazilians and Europeans; all consider themselves brothers; as descendants of the same origin, as inhabitants of the same country, as believers of the same religion."

Journalism, in its infancy, was propagating constitutional ideas both in the north and in the south. Jacobin declamation and romantic ideology created a powerful movement in the taciturn colony. Governmental juntas were appointed in the provinces. Portuguese and Brazilians struggled for political and social domination, but a Lusitanian army, in spite of popular protest, imposed the oath of fidelity to the Constitution which had been promulgated for the metropolis by the distant Cortes.

The prince prevented a federal disaggregation and founded the unity of Brazil. He united the representatives of the rebellious provinces, convoked, in 1822, a Constituent Assembly, visited the country districts, and became the "perpetual defender of Brazil." Like the Gothic kings at the time of the Moorish invasion, or the French princes who were faced with feudal anarchy, he founded a national dynasty, and bound the unity and independence of Brazil with the destinies of the monarchy. Dom João VI. had raised Brazil to the rank of a kingdom; Pedro I. rendered it independent of Portugal. "Independence or death!" he cried, in his triumphant Odyssey across the rebellious provinces. At Ipiranga floated the new flag, gold and green, of the new-born Empire. Pedro I. was crowned Constitutional Emperor in December, 1822.

José Bonifacio Andrade e Silva, naturalist, philosopher, and soldier, an encyclopædist according to the French tradition, was the minister of this national transformation; he condemned the revolution, having previously supported natural rights and excessive liberties. He suppressed the journals, and the monarch dissolved the Constituent Assembly, whose violence and lyrical propensities were not a help to the political action of a conservative minister.

Extreme groups were formed which the Emperor endeavoured to conciliate: reactionaries who wanted an absolute government, idealists who wished for a republic, moderates, and conciliatory monarchists who sought a gradual progress under a stable government. Weary of revolutions the Emperor inaugurated a despotic régime; he withdrew from the Assembly, exiled the rebels, among others Andrade, now radical but formerly a reactionary, and always greedy for power. He surrounded himself with Portuguese troops, and the new nobility, the filhos do reinho, and the press attacked him in the name of nationalism. It demanded the persecution of favourites, as in the Spanish colonies the expulsion of the old ruling classes was decreed.

The Emperor once again united the moderate parties, and demanded a Constitution, to which the country swore allegiance in 1824; it was a constitutional charter, an imitation of the liberal European charters. In 1826 he convoked a new National Assembly. Revolutions were still disturbing the country; some provinces wished to secede from the new kingdom; Pernambuco was always the centre of liberalism. An old patriot, Paez de Andrade, hoped to unite the Northern States of Brazil in the "Confederation of the Equator." The monarch sent troops to the north to intimidate the country, and the Lower Chamber condemned this act of despotism; a radical priest, Diego Antonio Feijó, led the radical opposition. He was a revolutionary in Parliament, demanding a responsible government, and condemning the ministers who forced peace upon the provinces by means of foreign legions, German and Irish mercenaries.

The Chambers were invaded by republicans and federals, and Pedro I. by no means abandoned his reactionary ministers. These latter succeeded one another in a series of perpetual crises. The external warfare complicated the political situation; Uruguay had revolted, counting on the aid of Argentine regiments. The Brazilians were defeated, and recognised the independence of Uruguay by the treaty of 1828.

King João died in 1826, and the Emperor remained undecided between the traditional kingdom and the new Empire. He formed a liberal Cabinet to satisfy radicals and federalists, who had triumphed at the elections of 1830. A useless transaction: ministries fell, and the financial muddle increased. The people of Rio de Janeiro revolted, and the Emperor abdicated. José Bonifacio, creator of the political régime, was to be the tutor of the infant prince.

The Regency was a moderate government which steered clear of reactionaries and exaltés both, of absolutism and republicanism. Father Feijó, minister of the Regency, became, like many radicals, a conservative; he organised the National Guard, suppressed military meetings and enforced peace in the interior. Subversive movements continued, and the invulnerable minister repressed them. The administration of the country progressed, schools were founded, the Assembly issued wise codes of laws. The Regent, Andrade, imprisoned and deposed, Diego Feijó was elected tutor of the prince in 1835; the old radical politician was now dictator. He represented the moderates as against the revolutionists; in extreme cases he abandoned liberalism for autocracy. As early as 1836 his political autocracy began to decline and the liberal campaign gathered force. Feijó passed over the regency to his friend, Aranjo Lima, and left the Government. This representative of authority in a country which was a prey to anarchy was autocratic by virtue of his patriotism; like all American dictators he stifled revolution in its blood.

The liberals of yesterday are often the moderates or conservatives of to-day in monarchical Brazil. Andrade, Feijó, and Pereira de Vasconcellos are examples of this inevitable transformation. Liberty was the creed of these politicians when they were oppressed by colonial absolutism, by the servitude anterior to the monarchy and the Empire; they realised their creed, and the reign of liberal principles resulted in disorder. The excess of authority or the excess of anarchy stood in the way of peace and progress. The political leaders of Brazil swayed from side to side; they were liberals against despotism and autocrats against demagogy.

In 1840 the infant prince attained his majority; the liberals, powerful in Parliament, demanded that the Regency should be terminated. The country longed for internal peace, but discord between the parties continued. Numerous revolutions disturbed the country. Minas and Pernambuco, where sedition had passed into a chronic condition, rose in 1842 and 1848 respectively.

Pedro II. governed with the liberals, but the dangers of excessive liberalism, of premature democracy, forced him toward autocracy. He was a learned and sceptical Marcus Aurelius, a stoic who had read Voltaire. "A simple and modest democrat, losing nothing of his personal distinction," wrote the historian Ribeiro, "generous and disinterested, an example of all the domestic virtues, he courted the respectful sympathy of the crowd rather than popularity."[1] He was the first republican of Brazil; he presided over a nation in process of transformation. Before the clash of races, the revolutionary unrest, and Utopian radicalism his Government maintained the traditions, reacted against violent reforms, and favoured the gradual formation of a new world.

In 1841 he confided the ministry to the Marquis de Paranagua, who exiled the revolutionaries, reinforced the political unity of the country, and re-established the Council of State. New ministries continued the conservative reaction. Without freeing the slaves, Brazil prohibited the traffic in this black merchandise, at the suggestion of England. The Empire, faithful to its traditions, intervened in the affairs of La Plata.

The Viscount de Itaborahy, once the external conflict was at an end, presided over an administrative ministry. Immigrants were attracted, and founded German colonies in the south; the navigation of the interior was protected, and the higher regions of the Sertaõ were conquered. A new commercial code, an administrative organisation, agrarian laws, and the reform of the treasury: such were the various forms of the Imperial activity. Itaborahy was followed by an authoritative minister, the Marquis de Parana, a political figure of lasting national significance.

A great administrator, he organised public education, and extended the railways and the navigation of the rivers of the interior. He was assisted in his labours by distinguished statesmen: a jurist, Nabuco de Araujo, and a diplomatist, Baron de Rio Branco. His activities were not merely administrative, but political and social as well. He wished to reconcile the parties; he absorbed the liberal element in the conservative group, and by this fusion of the old parties prepared the way for the appearance of new groups, dominated by a definite intention of liberation or conservation. The reactionary cabinets and the philosopher-Emperor had founded order in the place of revolutionary dispersion. But this order, the victory of narrow traditionalism, could not be lasting. Multiple racial elements—Portuguese, Indian, and African—were seething in the new society; democracy would prove to be the protest of redeemed slaves against a powerful oligarchy. The Marquis de Parana, who, having attracted the liberals, transformed his own conservative group, and consolidated order by reuniting the factions, understood that reaction could not be permanent in an incoherent democracy. He was the last of the conservatives and the first of the liberals.

The reactionary cabinets of Caxias, Olinda, and Ferraz followed his, and other parties were formed: authoritative conservatives, uncompromising liberals, and a party of conciliation. The elections of 1860 were a democratic triumph. Great orators came to the fore with a truly tropical eloquence; these "new men," like Antonio Leocadio Guzman in Venezuela, stirred the passions of the people. To oppose their liberal programme conservatives and moderate liberals united in Congress. The reactionaries governed from 1848 to 1862; now the radicals sought for power. The last conservative cabinets fell to pieces before the opposition of Parliament and the protests of the crowd. Despotic monarchy was condemned; constitutional monarchy had many supporters; new elections, in 1863, increased the strength of the liberals and democrats. The Paraguayan war against the dictatorship of Lopez gave unusual prominence to the external life of the country, and political agitation died down.

Pedro II., representing the conservative interests of historical and national continuity, was opposed to an unruly liberalism. After one liberal ministry he chose two moderate cabinets, under Olinda and Vasconcellos, which were inclined to conservatism, and finally Itaborahy dissolved the Lower Chamber. The Emperor had gone back ten years; the ministry that in 1852 had marked the triumph of the conservatives was now to rule in the face of a rising tide of democracy. A constitutional monarch by law, he was none the less an autocrat, for he forced his ministries upon a hostile Chamber, and gave politics a direction contrary to the will of the people, and those their suffrage had newly elected.

The liberals rose against the reactionary Emperor and demanded reform or revolution. A transformation of the electoral system, of the Draconian code of justice, and of the army, which was really a Prætorian legion supporting an absolute power, and, in the social department, the liberation of the slaves: such was the programme of 1869. A dissident group of conservatives united with the liberals, and a patrician, Nabuco de Araujo, signed the manifesto of the reformers.

It was the crisis of the monarchy. Its historical function was nearly at an end; it had organised peace, created unity and nationality, and laid the orderly foundations of the new Brazilian race. Autocracy, necessary in the dawn of the century, was now contrary to democratic development; after 1870 the liberals openly aspired to found a republic.

The ministry of Viscount Rio Branco, from 1871 to 1876, maintained the status quo. A great administrator, like the Marquis de Parana, he effected a reform in public education by founding special schools; he took a census of the country, and extended the network of railways. Immigration increased under his government and exchange was bettered. A great social reform changed the face of the Empire; in 1871 slavery was abolished. The separated classes were about to mingle with the nation; the result was the rise of a mestizo democracy. Slavery abolished, castes confounded, liberals discontented, the reactionaries growing old—on the doubtful horizon one supreme hope was visible: the republic. It was now the collective ideal, as the Empire had been in the last days of the colonial period. It was proclaimed, without violence, in 1889.

The Emperor, who abdicated, a symbol of the majestic past, had prepared the advent of the Republic that ostracised him. His ideas were liberal; he was the protector of the sciences; a smiling philosopher; and in fostering the intellectual transformation of Brazil he exposed his own autocracy to the criticism of the liberals. By abolishing slavery he weakened the power of the reigning oligarchy; by destroying privileges and uniting hostile classes he created a democracy.

The Empire, in America, represents tutelary authority. Between the feudal colony and the Republic—two extreme points of political development—arose the Brazilian monarchy, as a moderative power. It brought a necessary equilibrium, and, with that, progress. First of all it established autonomy; then a national order, a national dynasty; it preserved traditions, and organised the forces of society. Beside it arose a conservative oligarchy, bound to the soil; castes and permanent interests were created. The territorial overlords upheld the stability of the Empire, and an admirable political system imposed peace upon a heterogeneous people, shaken by the clash of races and the opposition of seaboard and province. Between 1848 and 1862 the monarchy created the Brazilian nation.

In the South American republics anarchy destroys national unity and prevents the crystallisation of the social classes. In Brazil there were frequent revolutions under the Regency; military leaders were eager for power, but there was a permanent and inviolable bulwark against disorder. The Emperor was the caudillo of caudillos, the leader of leaders; the Constitution partially justified his despotism. Without violating it, he imposed, by means of conservative ministries, lasting peace and gradual reforms. Against this inflexible Cæsar struggled a seething democracy; it snatched certain privileges and won limited liberties, and eventually saw the birth of the Republic, the appointed term of political and social evolution. The rigour of the principle of authority has spared Brazil the perpetual revolutionary crises endured by other American nations.

[1] Work already cited, p. 516.

CHAPTER IV

PARAGUAY: PERPETUAL DICTATORSHIP

Dr. Francia—The opinion of Carlyle—The two Lopez—Tyranny and the military spirit in Paraguay.

Paraguay, a child of the old régime, has preserved seclusion and absolutism. In other republics independence was a violent condemnation of the colonial methods. Freed from Spanish tutelage, the Paraguayan democracy none the less maintained its retired life under paternal monarchs. Its evolution is original; showing neither continual anarchy, as in the tropics, nor the perpetual quarrels of caudillos, disputing territory and wealth. Dictators and tyrants imposed their inviolable will on the inland nation. Autocracy levelled classes and races, and prepared the way for the appearance, in isolated Paraguay, of a new caste, formed of the fusion of Guarani Indians and Spaniards. The dictators of Paraguay professed a rigid Americanism; they expelled strangers, and with arrogant patriotism wished the republic to be self-sufficing. Their ideal was essentially Spanish; a democracy governed by Cæsar.

Dr. Francia was the first dictator in the Republic founded by the Jesuits. A gloomy personality, of an intense inner life, like Garcia-Moreno, he seemed one of Cromwell's Puritans. Taciturn and solitary, truthful and punctual, methodical, like the Anglo-Saxons, and ambitious, but without passion or exaltation, he admired Bonaparte, and like him became consul and emperor.

He was born in 1758. He was the son of a Portuguese or Brazilian, Garcia Rodriguez Francia. He studied theology in the colonial university of silent, austere Cordoba. When General Belgrano fomented the rebellion of the Paraguayans against the Spanish rule, and a governmental junta was installed, Caspar Rodriguez Francia was a member of the latter. The little republic elected triumvirs and consuls in the Roman manner. A Congress assembled in the same year decreed the independence of Paraguay. The country freed itself not only from Spain but also from Buenos-Ayres. No longer recognising the limits of the ancient vice-kingdom, the junta refused to treat with Belgrano unless he recognised the autonomy of Paraguay.

The Congress of 1813, at which a thousand deputies were present, continued to parody Rome; it appointed Francia and Fulgencio Yegros consuls, and promulgated a political system. Cæsar and Pompey became the names of the new magistrates, who were alternately in power. The liberty of Paraguay was consolidated, and the consuls refused to send delegates to the Congress of La Plata, which the haughty metropolis convoked at Buenos-Ayres. These magistrates condemned Argentines and Spaniards to civil death, and forbade them to marry Paraguayan women of white race. In a third Congress (1814) Francia and Yegros demanded a temporary dictatorship.

Yegros was ignorant and popular. Francia, energetic, learned, and a born dissembler, was obedient to classic memories and to the Napoleonic tradition; he aspired to absolute power. He was appointed dictator for three years, and soon obtained supreme power. He improvised his policy upon reading the ancient history of Rollin; the republicans of Rome served him as constant models, whose energy and austerity he imitated.

Educated for the priesthood, he became an advocate. He knew the law and theology like a lettered colonial, subtle and dogmatic. Before becoming consul he had filled various municipal offices; first he was secretary to the municipality, then mayor. He studied local needs, and prepared to govern as a nationalist.

He made use of religion, as did Garcia-Moreno and Portales, in order to render his political actions more efficacious. He was tolerant in respect of beliefs, but condemned atheism; he felt that the Church was the only moral force in a disturbed democracy.

He would accept no international religion; he wanted a Paraguayan, American cult, in which also he resembled Guzman-Blanco. He declared himself head of the national Church, and disregarded the authority of the Holy See; he suppressed the seminary and the monastic orders of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Sisters of Mercy, and proceeded to appoint vicars and curates himself. The Inquisition was abolished, processions were forbidden, and the number of holidays was reduced to a minimum. Francia ordered the payment of tithes, protected religion, and extended the rights conferred by patronage on the Spanish kings; he sold the goods of the Church to build schools and barracks. In short, he aspired to govern a Christian republic freed from clericalism.

Religion consecrated his authority; the Paraguayan Church taught that all power, even tyranny, was in its essence divine. When moral activity did not suffice, Francia, like Rosas, appealed to terror. Conspiracies against his tyranny were numerous; the Dictator shot the rebels. His punishments revealed an Oriental cruelty. In 1821 he executed the representatives of the Paraguayan nobility. He levelled his subjects, and governed without ministers, surrounded only by informers and prætorian guards. In 1860 a Congress conferred perpetual dictatorship upon him, and he dissolved the Congress. He suppressed the cabildos, or municipalities, and replaced them by juntas selected by himself; he annihilated all hierarchy and all privilege, and assassinated Yegros, his companion in the Consulate. His enemies he imprisoned, exiled, or killed. His ambition was to cut off every head that raised itself above the level of the uniform, anonymous, and laborious crowd.

He established internal order under his autocracy. "Quarrels," he said, "paralyse industry, and injure the prosperity of the nation."

He created a Church and a Fatherland. To ensure his work, he expelled the Spaniards and isolated his country. He protected all foreigners who did not come from Spain, closed the ports to trade, and barred the rivers to free navigation.

His efforts were contradictory. He hated Spain; he wished to abolish the privileges of the nobility and clergy, and he restored the colonial system; he even aggravated it, giving it an unheard-of severity. He restored absolutism, commercial monopoly, and the communism of the Jesuits; there were estancias known as "the Country's," whose products satisfied the requirements of the budget. He unwillingly conceded licences to trade or navigate on the rivers; he opened great magazines, which recalled the colonial fairs, for the sale of merchandise. Paraguay existed in a condition of prodigious isolation; commercial transactions declined, and money went out of circulation.

During this time the population increased. The Dictator favoured Creoles, stimulated the crossing of Indian and foreign blood by severe measures, and carefully chose foreigners for the improvement of the Paraguayan population by means of forced unions; in this way he continued the work of the Jesuits. A homogeneous democracy, a national conscience, was gradually formed.

Like all the great American dictators, he stimulated material progress, and rebuilt Assomption, the capital city. He constructed public works, and forts to stop the encroachments of Indians, protected agriculture, and created industries. His ideal was full autonomy in an isolation possibly barbarous. By successive regulations he forced proprietors to sow their lands, to extend the cultivated area; like the Peruvian Incas, he would have none idle in his kingdom; he distributed tasks and enforced their execution.

He ruled from 1811 to 1840, a long thirty years, a period attained by no other American dictator but Rosas. His work was rude and imposing; he created a race, and freed his threatened country in every sense, political, economic, and religious. A priest said once in an ardent panegyric: "The Lord, having cast a pitying glance upon our country, sent us Dr. Francia to save it." The tyrant thus became a redeemer, and is not without his strange legend. At seventy years of age he was regarded as a remote and divine personage. From a secret palace he governed a disciplined people. He had militarised the country and exalted patriotism, the strong national feeling of small nations, from Uruguay and Paraguay in America and Servia, to Bulgaria and Montenegro in Europe.

His long tyranny in no way debased the race. When he died Francia was mourned by his people, a people about to reveal in warfare a Spartan tenacity, a tranquil heroism. Paraguay was unconquerable; it was dispeopled, the masculine population disappeared, but the Republic remained erect and aggressive. Francia had formed a proud and warlike race. He was the most extraordinary man the world had seen for a hundred years, said Carlyle in one of his Essays—a Dominican ripe for canonisation, an excellent superior of Jesuits, a rude and atrabilious Grand Inquisitor. The Scottish historian praises the grim silences of Francia—"the grim unspeakabilities"—that mute solitude in which remarkable men commune with the mystery of things.

After thirty years of uniform dictatorship the Guaranian people might have revolted against autocracy. But here, contrary to that which passed in other republics, the monarchy was not the term of absolutism. Francia was replaced by new tyrants, the two Lopez, and Paraguay accepted perpetual dictatorship.

A "ricorso" exhibited the old round of evolution: the triumvirate, then the consulate, then dictatorship.

The last of the Lopez was better educated and more moderate than the previous tyrants; he militarised the country, created an army of thirty thousand men, and developed the fleet. Brazil and the Argentine had difficulties with Paraguay; these two countries were quarrelling for supremacy in La Plata. Paraguay and Uruguay, States rebellious to every yoke, provoked conflicts between these ambitious powers. Brazil demanded reparation for the attacks directed by Uruguay against Brazilians, and Lopez intervened as meditator in this conflict. He assisted Uruguay to maintain "the equilibrium of La Plata." The Empire refused his good offices, and the haughty tyrant declared war. He asked General Mitre, President of the Argentine Republic, permission to send his troops across the territory of Corrientes. The President refused permission, and protested against the accumulation of Paraguayan troops on the frontier. The belligerents were now three. Paraguay attacked two powerful States, the Argentine and Brazil. The war lasted five years (1865-70).

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.