THE WAR IN PARAGUAY.
EUROPE has missed a good deal in missing the details of the Paraguayan War, which, had they been forthcoming, would have been followed with unfaltering interest. The scene, it is true, is remote, and no very grave English interest is involved, for Lopez's English wife will protect the Englishmen detained; but there is scarcely a problem of modern militarypoli- tics, whether it be the fighting strength of slaveholding States, the possibility of scientific warfare without loans, the value of fortresses, the use of ironclads, the best means of river defence, or the capacity of half civilized races for military organization, which has not, during the struggle, been put to the severest test. Indeed, the war involves, strangely enough, one intellec- tual or quasi-moral issue of alniost inconceivable importance. Many observers by no means friendly to Mr. Carlyle's ideas have believed that the swiftest and most certain means of raising a savage people or loosing the bonds of a stereotyped civilization is to be found in the Jesuit idea of "discipline," of thorough individual training upon the basis of obedience con- sidered as the highest of moral virtues. Such obedience could scarcely last long enough to extinguish freedom, but it might last long enough to ensure the cultivation of an otherwise uncultivable race. The idea has never been worked out thoroughly except in Paraguay, but there it has been supreme for three generations, and the result, as tested by war, has undoubtedly been in one respect successful. The training has developed the highest conceivable military virtue, has changed a race of savages into a people capable of using scientific weapons, of obeying orders it was impossible to enforce, of dying to the last man not as a mob, but as an organized army, with perfect discipline, in defence of their independence. When the war began Lopez, third Dictator of Paraguay, had but a million and a half of subjects, say, 300,000 adult males, or 200,000 males capable of bearing arms, and only 8,000 regular troops. His authority rested, therefore, chiefly on the moral duty of obedience, on habit, and on a singularly perfect civil organization ; and it proved sufficient for efforts such as the world has scarcely if ever seen, efforts so continuous and so terrible that it will, we believe, be found that if Paraguay is defeated the Paraguayan people will have ceased to exist. The foes who attacked, or rather threatened the President of Paraguay, included the vast Empire of Brazil, with its boundless resources, and eight millions of people, and every member of the Argentine Con- federation, a combination wielding at the very least ten times the power at the disposal of the Paraguayans, an alliance in communication with Europe, able to raise loans, and relying on a slave population which must yield all and endure all its masters please. We know from the history of the American Civil War how great a power the undisputed command of labour can give to a fighting aristocracy. In spite of this disparity of force, this chief of an Indian tribe has, for two years and a half, maintained a civilized war, during which no hostile foot has touched his soil ; has without a loan compelled Brazil to double her public debt, and reduce her currency 33 per cent. of its exchangeable value ; has cost her entire armies of freemen ; has compelled her to offer freedom to slaves as the price of military service ; and, at the latest advices, with an ironclad fleet commanding his chief line of river communication,. and with the enemy behind and in front of his great fortress, has ordered the entire population of his capital to desert it, and has been obeyed ; and now stands—we quote the latest. telegram—with his army " massed " in front of the invaders' main battle, which he may yet destroy. Weary with the- exertions of two years, amidst incessant defeat, with peace offered on the condition that Lopez quits the country, hunted into the jungle, or called upon for personal service in a terrible- defensive war, with, according to some accounts, insufficient. food and scarcely any clothing, the Paraguayan people still die around their chief, still by the unbroken testimony of their enemies reply to offers of quarter, " We have no such orders," and so die silently, " run through as they lie upon the ground." Something, at all events, has been accomplished in Paraguay never yet accomplished elsewhere, something worth study- ing; and how Englishmen of all men, the only European people who have to discipline half-civilized races by the- hundred million, can feel pleasure at the violent termi- nation of such an experiment, the annihilation of such a people solely to glut the territorial greed of a few Portuguese slaveholders, who already misgovern a region greater than Europe with Russia included—a region with every climate, and which would feed a population like- that of China—passes our comprehension. The attrac- tions of the Brazilian stock market, the San Paulo Rail- way, and the coffee trade must be very powerful to pro- duce such a perversion of intellectual and moral sentiment.. There does not exist on earth—we doubt if there ever has existed—a system of slavery more cruel than that of Brazil ;. and it is for its extension, in the hope of spreading it through Uruguay, that the monster Slave Empire is destroying the- only aboriginal people of America which has developed an original and a successful form of civilization. If the Governing Committee of the Society of Jesus knew its own interest, in- stead of wearying itself with efforts to prevent the elevation of
Archbishop of Paris, it would make the Pope intervene to prevent the destruction of the one result of its two centuries- of toil which can still be regarded, if not with admiration, at least with interest.
It will, we greatly fear, though for reasons other than those- of the Jesuits, ultimately be destroyed. Lopez may not, it is. true, be crushed with the ease European speculators in Brazilian stock are inclined to expect. The Brazilian Admiral, pressed by peremptory orders from Rio, where the war is disorganizing: all administration, has passed Humaita, the frontier for- tress which commands the Paraguay, and occupied Assump- tion, but he has gained little by either expedient. The fortress gave back two shots for one, and though the ironclads proved impenetrable, they found, on their arrival at the capital, but one man to receive them—the Paraguayan Minister of Foreign Affairs. Every other human being had been withdrawn by the President's order, still, after years of defeat, obeyed as• that of Czar never was, and a few empty houses are useless, even for plunder. The Paraguayan fleet has proceeded higher up the river, the Brazilians have still to return under the inexhaustible fire of Humaita, where Lopez and his father have for thirty years accumulated munitions of war,—imagine an Indian State silently accumulating through a generation the materials for a great fleet and army in the interior of South America, a thousand miles from the sea l—and through all the obstacles with which Paraguayan self-devotion can fill the passage. These obstacles may be very great, as the monitors did not break the chains stretched across the river, but floated over them during an extraordinary rise of the water, which bent the chains in midstream nearly twelve feet. The fleet may find itself caught in a trap; 4nd the attack on an outwork of Humaita, so loudly celebrated, turns out to have been a very serious failure, attended by a loss of lives which the Brazilian Marshal, whose force must comprise men of all colours and every grade of semi-civilization, can ill afford to spare,—the latest account gives 6,000 men placed hors de combat out of 13,000—whilst Lopez himself, it was said, had moved out of Humaita, and " massed " his forces in front of the main position of the Brazilian army. The President may break up the Confederation yet, for if he wins one great battle or imprisons the Brazilian fleet, his party in Uruguay, which recently so nearly succeeded, will again rise in insurrection, and the last slave State in the world, ex- hausted with its efforts, over-burdened with its own hugeness, constantly threatened with internal revolt, with its slaves exceeding its freemen in number, and so weak at the extre- mities that Lopez during the war has possessed himself of Matto Grosso, a province as large as a European kingdom, may, to the relief of mankind, collapse. Even then, however, we fear the prosperity of Paraguay is at an end. The accumu- lated resources of the little State must have been nearly eaten np, and if we may learn anything from the analogy of the American Civil War, the population itself must have been frightfully reduced. Many thousands have been killed in a war in which no prisoners have been taken, and scores of thousands must have perished from unaccustomed fatigue, exposure, and disease. The Paraguayans, it must be re- membered, though all, we believe, trained by military disci- pline, have never been withdrawn in large masses from labour, and actual service must have come upon them as it would come upon Englishmen, or any other warlike race unaccustomed to the life of tents and sieges. These Indians multiply slowly, or Paraguay would by this time have been full ; and the losses of such a war will take, like the losses of Germany during the Thirty Years' War, a century to repair. Even when repaired, the specialty of Paraguay will doubtless have departed. The social system of the country, successful as it seems to be,—for what can a nation do more than perish in good order round its head ?—yet needs a man of genius to work it ; and, strange as has been the fortune of the State in tie rule of three such men as Francia and the elder and the younger Lopez, no people can hope for a permanent succes- sion of such men. The greatest experiment ever made among uncivilized men has, we greatly fear, already termi- minated in failure; and the Portuguese, who have demoralized every race they have come across all over the world, will have destroyed the first aboriginal nationality in America which has displayed a capacity for high scientific organization.
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