, and its mad
eddies swept away many of those who had proved themselves heroes in the
cause of independence. The severing of ties and of friendship was
necessarily abrupt, and occasionally claimed a victim. Among these was
Liniers, who in the last days of the Spanish regime had gathered
together a local force on the River Plate, and had dislodged the British
forces from Buenos Aires. This, however, did not prevent his execution
by the patriots soon after the outbreak of the war.

To enter into the details of individual cases is impossible here, since
volumes could be written on every separate decade, and on a score and
more of the personalities of this particular epoch in Argentina alone.
Paraguay stood out as an exception to the rest. In that State the reins
of power fell into the hands of Dr. Francia, a merciless autocrat, who
suffered nothing whatever to be disturbed within the frontiers of his
country, and who now ruled with a ferocious tyranny, such as had
scarcely been approached even in the darkest days of the early colonial
age. After that Paraguay was destined to undergo its baptism of fire as
well as the rest; the process seemed inevitable. In Paraguay it had not
been avoided; it had merely been postponed.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE REPUBLIC OF PERU

With the end of the Spanish power the centres of importance--hitherto
quite arbitrarily and artificially chosen--tended to drift to their
natural situations. From time to time it is true that the balance
continued to be disturbed by political considerations, but in the main
the true order of progress was permitted to proceed unchecked. Thus the
importance of Peru fell to its intrinsic and industrial level, and the
States of the north, artificially buoyed up for generations as these had
been by the Spaniards, now assumed a secondary place in the affairs of
the Continent.

Each State, in fact, had now to rely upon its own population and
resources alone. Of the number there were few enough who were not
generously provided with the latter; it was in the former asset that so
many were found acutely wanting, of course through no fault of their
own. Thus it was that when the new division of territories took place,
many of those countries which Nature had provided with an almost
extraordinary degree of wealth found themselves in a state of poverty
through the mere want of labour which might develop these resources. In
some cases this disadvantage has been overcome