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itself these 'two years,' and now on Good-Friday next' is to burst out; starting with the massacre of Dr. Francia and others, whatever it may close with !11 Francia was not a man to be trifled with in plots! He looked, watched, investigated, till he got the exact extent, position, nature and structure of this Plot fully in his eye; and then—why, then he pounced on it like a glede-falcon, like a fierce condor, suddenly from the invisible blue; struck beak and claws into the very heart of it, tore it into small fragments, and consumed it on the spot. It is Francia's way! This was the last plot, though not the first plot, Francia ever heard of during his Perpetual Dictatorship.

It is, as we find, over these three or these two years, while the Fulgencio Plot is getting itself pounced upon and torn in pieces, that the 'reign of terror,' properly so called, extends. Over these three or these two years only,-though the 'running shriek' of it confuses all things to the end of the chapter. It was in this stern period that Francia executed above forty persons. Not entirely inexplicable! "Par Dios, ye shall not conspire against me; I will not allow it! The Career of Freedom, be it known to all men and Gauchos, is not yet begun in this country; I am still only casting out the Seven Devils. My lease of Paraguay, a harder one than your stupidities suppose, is for life: the contract is, Thou must die if thy lease be taken from thee. Aim not at my life, ye constitutional Gauchos, —or let it be a diviner man than Don Fulgencio the Horsesubduer that does it. By Heaven, if you aim at my life, I will bid you have a care of your own!" He executed upwards of forty persons. How many he arrested, flogged, cross-questioned-for he is an inexorable man! If you are guilty, or suspected of guilt, it will go ill with you here. Francia's arrest, carried by a grenadier, arrives; you are in strait prison; you are in Francia's bodily presence; those sharp St.-Dominic eyes, that diabolic intellect, prying into you, probing, crossquestioning you, till the secret cannot be hid: till the three ball-cartridges' are handed to a sentry;—and your doom is Rhadamanthine!

But the Plots, as we say, having ceased by this rough surgery, it would appear that there was, for the next twenty years, 11 Rengger.

little or no more of it, little or no use for more. The 'reign of terror,' one begins to find, was properly a reign of rigour; which would become 'terrible' enough if you infringed the rules of it, but which was peaceable otherwise, regular otherwise. Let this, amid the 'running shriek,' which will and should run its full length in such circumstances, be well kept in mind.

It happened too, as Rengger tells us, in the same year (1820, as we grope and gather), that a visitation of locusts, as sometimes occurs, destroyed all the crops of Paraguay; and there was no prospect but of universal dearth or famine. The crops are done; eaten by locusts; the summer at an end! We have no foreign trade, or next to none, and never had almost any; what will become of Paraguay (and its Gauchos? In Gauchos is no hope, no help: but in a Dionysius of the Gauchos? Dictator Francia, led by occult French Sciences and natural sagacity, nay driven by necessity itself, peremptorily commands the farmers, throughout all Paraguay, To sow a certain portion of their lands anew; with or without hope,— under penalties! The result was a moderately good harvest still the result was a discovery that Two harvests were, every year, possible in Paraguay; that Agriculture, a rigorous Dictator presiding over it, could be infinitely improved there.12 As Paraguay has about 100,000 square miles of territory mostly fertile, and only some two souls planted on each square mile thereof, it seemed to the Dictator that this, and not Foreign Trade, might be a good course for his Paraguenos. This accordingly, and not foreign trade, in the present state of the political horizon, was the course resolved on; the course persisted in, with evident advantages,' says Rengger. Thus, one thing acting on another,—domestic Plot, hanging on Artigas's country from without; and Locust-swarms with Improvement of Husbandry in the interior; and those Guardhouses all already there, along the frontier,— Paraguay came more and more to be hermetically closed; and Francia reigned over it, for the rest of his life, as a rigorous Dionysius of Paraguay, without foreign intercourse, or with such only as seemed good to Francia.

How the Dictator, now secure in possession, did manage 12 Rengger, pp. 67 &c.

this huge Paraguay, which, by strange 'insidious' and other means, had fallen in life-lease to him, and was his to do the best he could with, it were interesting to know. What the meaning of him, the result of him, actually was? One desiderates some Biography of Francia by a native!-Meanwhile, in the Esthetische Briefwechsel of Herr Professor Sauerteig, a Work not yet known in England, nor treating specially of this subject, we find, scattered at distant intervals, a remark or two which may be worth translating. Professor Sauerteig, an open soul, looking with clear eye and large recognising heart over all accessible quarters of the world, has cast a sharp sunglance here and there into Dr. Francia too. These few philosophical Remarks of his, and then a few Anecdotes gleaned elsewhere, such as the barren ground yields, must comprise what more we have to say of Francia.

'Pity,' exclaims Sauerteig once, 'that a nation cannot reform itself, as the English are now trying to do, by what their newspapers call "tremendous cheers"! Alas, it cannot be done. Reform is not joyous but grievous; no single man can reform himself without stern suffering and stern working; how much less can a nation of men! The serpent sheds not his old skin without rusty disconsolateness; he is not happy but miserable! In the Water-cure itself, do you not sit steeped for months; washed to the heart in elemental drenchings; and, like Job, are made to curse your day? Reforming of a nation is a terrible business! Thus too, Medea, when she made men young again, was wont (du Himmel!) to hew them in pieces with meat-axes; cast them into caldrons, and boil them for a length of time. How much handier could they but have done it by "tremendous cheers" alone !'— —

'Like a drop of surgical antiseptic liquid, poured (by the benign Powers, as I fancy!) into boundless brutal corruptions; very sharp, very caustic, corrosive enough, this tawny tyrannous Dr. Francia, in the interior of the South-American continent,—he too is one of the elements of the grand Phenomenon there. A monstrous moulting-process taking place; monstrous gluttonous boa-constrictor (he is of length from Panama to Patagonia) shedding his old skin; whole continent getting itself chopped to pieces, and boiled in the Medea caldron, to become young again,-unable to manage it by "tremendous cheers" alone!'

'What they say about "love of power" amounts to little. Power? Love of "power" merely to make flunkies come and go for you is a "love," I should think, which enters only into the minds of persons in a very infantine state! A grown man, like this Dr. Francia, who wants nothing, as I am assured, but three cigars daily, a cup of maté, and

four ounces of butchers' meat with brown bread: the whole world and its united flunkies, taking constant thought of the matter, can do nothing for him but that only. That he already has, and has had always; why should he, not being a minor, love flunky "power"? He loves to see you about him, with your flunky promptitudes, with your grimaces, adulations and sham-loyalty? You are so beautiful, a daily and hourly feast to the eye and soul? Ye unfortunates, from his heart rises one prayer, That the last created flunky had vanished from this universe, never to appear more!

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'And yet truly a man does tend, and must under frightful penalties perpetually tend, to be king of his world; to stand in his world as what he is, a centre of light and order, not of darkness and confusion. man loves power: yes, if he see disorder his eternal enemy rampant about him, he does love to see said enemy in the way of being conquered; he can have no rest till that come to pass! Your Mahomet cannot bear a rent cloak, but clouts it with his own hands; how much more a rent country, a rent world? He has to imprint the image of his own veracity upon the world, and shall, and must, and will do it, more or less it is at his peril if he neglect any great or any small possibility he may have of this. Francia's inner flame is but a meagre, blue-burning one: let him irradiate midnight Paraguay with it, such as it is.’—

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'Nay, on the whole, how cunning is Nature in getting her farms leased! Is it not a blessing this Paraguay can get the one veracious man it has, to take lease of it, in these sad circumstances? His farm-profits, and whole wages, it would seem, amount only to what is called "Nothing, and find yourself"! Spartan food and lodging, solitude, three cigars, and a cup of maté daily, he already had.'

Truly, it would seem, as Sauerteig remarks, Dictator Francia had not a very joyous existence of it, in this his lifelease of Paraguay! Casting-out of the Seven Devils from a Gaucho population is not joyous at all; both exorcist and exorcised find it sorrowful! Meanwhile, it does appear, there was some improvement made: no veritable labour, not even a Dr. Francia's, is in vain.

Of Francia's improvements there might as much be said as of his cruelties or rigours; for indeed, at bottom, the one was in proportion to the other. He improved agriculture :— not two ears of corn where one only grew, but two harvests of corn, as we have seen! He introduced schools, 'boardingschools,' 'elementary schools,' and others, on which Rengger has a chapter; everywhere he promoted education as he could; repressed superstition as he could. Strict justice between man

and man was enforced in his Law-courts: he himself would accept no gift, not even a trifle, in any case whatever. Rengger, on packing-up for departure, had left in his hands, not from forgetfulness, a Print of Napoleon; worth some shillings in Europe, but invaluable in Paraguay, where Francia, who admired this Hero much, had hitherto seen no likeness of him but a Nürnberg caricature. Francia sent an express after Rengger, to ask what the value of the Print was. No value; M. Rengger could not sell Prints; it was much at his Excellency's service. His Excellency straightway returned it. An exact, decisive man! Peculation, idleness, ineffectuality, had to cease in all the Public Offices of Paraguay. So far as lay in Francia, no public and no private man in Paraguay was allowed to slur his work; all public and all private men, so far as lay in Francia, were forced to do their work or die! We might define him as the born enemy of quacks; one who has from Nature a hearthatred of unveracity in man or in thing, wheresoever he sees it. Of persons who do not speak the truth, and do not act the truth, he has a kind of diabolic-divine impatience; they had better disappear out of his neighbourhood. Poor Francia: his light was but a very sulphurous, meagre, blue-burning one; but he irradiated Paraguay with it (as our Professor says) the best he could.

That he had to maintain himself alive all the while, and would suffer no man to glance contradiction at him, but instantaneously repressed all such: this too we need no ghost to tell us; this lay in the very nature of the case. His lease of Paraguay was a life-lease. He had his 'three ball-cartridges' ready for whatever man he found aiming at his life. He had frightful prisons. He had Tevego far up among the wastes, a kind of Paraguay Siberia, to which unruly persons, not yet got the length of shooting, were relegated. The main exiles, Rengger says, were drunken mulattoes and the class called unfortunatefemales. They lived miserably there; became a sadder, and perhaps a wiser, body of mulattoes and unfortunate-females.

But let us listen for a moment to the Reverend Manuel Perez as he preaches, 'in the Church of the Incarnation at Assumpcion, on the 20th of October 1840,' in a tone somewhat nasal, yet trustworthy withal. His Funeral Discourse,' translated into a kind of English, presents itself still audible

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