of
the Unitaries that a last desperate effort might shake off his hated
control. In May, 1851, Justo Jose de Urquiza, one of his most trusted
lieutenants, declared the independence of his own province and called
upon the others to rise against the tyrant. Enlisting the support
of Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay, he assembled a "great army of
liberation," composed of about twenty-five thousand men, at whose head
he marched to meet the redoubtable Rosas. On February 3,1852, at a spot
near Buenos Aires, the man of might who, like his contemporary Francia
in Paraguay, had held the Argentine Confederation in thralldom for so
many years, went down to final defeat. Embarking on a British warship he
sailed for England, there to become a quiet country gentleman in a land
where gauchos and dictators were unhonored.

In the meantime Paraguay, spared from such convulsion as racked its
neighbor on the east, dragged on its secluded existence of backwardness
and stagnation. Indians and half-castes vegetated in ignorance and
docility, and the handful of whites quaked in terror, while the
inexorable Francia tightened the reins of commercial and industrial
restriction and erected forts along the frontiers to keep out the
pernicious foreigner. At his death, in 1840, men and women wept at his
funeral in fear perchance, as one historian remarks, lest he come
back to life; and the priest who officiated at the service likened the
departed dictator to Caesar and Augustus!

Paraguay was destined, however, to fall under a despot far worse than
Francia when in 1862 Francisco Solano Lopez became President. The new
ruler was a man of considerable intelligence and education. While a
traveler in Europe he had seen much of its military organizations, and
he had also gained no slight acquaintance with the vices of its capital
cities. This acquired knowledge he joined to evil propensities until
he became a veritable monster of wickedness. Vain, arrogant, reckless,
absolutely devoid of scruple, swaggering in victory, dogged in defeat,
ferociously cruel at all times, he murdered his brothers and his best
friends; he executed, imprisoned, or banished any one whom he thought
too influential; he tortured his mother and sisters; and, like the
French Terrorists, he impaled his officers upon the unpleasant dilemma
of winning victories or losing their lives. Even members of the American
legation suffered torment at his hands, and the minister himself barely
esca