Travellers Agree In Affirming That Of All South Americans The Paraguayans Are The Most Mild-Mannered And Lethargic; Yet When These People Are Once Aroused They Fight With Tigerish Pertinacity.

The pages of history may be searched in vain for examples of warfare waged at such odds; but the result is invariably the same, the weaker nation, whether right or wrong, goes under.

Although the national mottoes vary with the different flags, yet the Chilian is the most universally followed in South America, as elsewhere: "Por la razon o la fuerza" (By right or by might). The Paraguayans contended heroically for what they considered their rights, and such bloody battles were fought that at Curupaita alone 5,000 dead and dying were left on the field! Added to the carnage of battle was disease on every hand. The worst epidemic of smallpox ever known in the annals of history was when the Brazilians lost 43,000 men, while this war was being waged against Paraguay. One hundred thousand bodies were left unburied, and on them the wild animals and vultures gorged themselves. The saying now is a household word, that the jaguar of those lands is the most to be dreaded, through having tasted so much human blood.

"Lopez, the cause of all this sacrifice and misery, has gone to his final account, his soul stained with the blood of seven hundred thousand of his people, the victims of his ambition and cruelty."

Towns which flourished before the outbreak of hostilities were sacked by the emboldened Indians from the Chaco and wiped off the map, San Salvador (Holy Saviour) being a striking example. I visited the ruins of this town, where formerly dwelt about 8,000 souls. Now the streets are grass-grown, and the forest is creeping around church and barracks, threatening to bury them. I rode my horse through the high portal of the cannon-battered church, while the stillness of the scene reminded me of a city of the dead. City of the dead, truly - men and women and children who have passed on! My horse nibbled the grass growing among the broken tiles of the floor, while I, in imagination, listened to the "passing bell" in the tower above me, and under whose shade I sought repose. A traveller, describing this site, says: "It is a place of which the atmosphere is one great mass of malaria, and the heat suffocating - where the surrounding country is an uninterrupted marsh - where venomous insects and reptiles abound." San Salvador as a busy mart has ceased to exist, and the nearest approach to "the human form divine," found occasionally within its walls, is the howling monkey. Such are the consequences of war! During the last ten years Paraguay has been slowly recovering from the terrible effects of this war, but a republic composed mostly of women is severely handicapped. [Footnote: Would the suffragettes disagree with the writer here?]

Paraguay is a poor land; the value of its paper currency, like that of most South American countries, fluctuates almost daily.

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