Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1885 — Lopez and the Paraguayans. [ARTICLE]

Lopez and the Paraguayans.

Nover was a ruler, a chief, better served by his subjects <• than Solano Francisco Lopez, second of the family name; and nevdr did anyone personally less deserve such devotedness and fidelity. While the Paraguayans, whom his reckless and disproportioned ambition or Vanity alone had involved in a war with half, and more than half, the South American Continent, a war of one to twenty, in which defeat and ruin might well from the outset have seemed foregone conclusions, were perishing for him iby battalions in the field, or starving in the forests, men, women, and children, during the six long years of a nation’s agony, preferring death in its worst forms to foreign rule, or to any conditions of peace with the invaders of their land, Lopez himself, sole cause and originator of the war, well provided not merely with the necessaries but even with the luxuries of life, lay hid behind the securest defenses, or remained absent at safe distance from the scene of actual combat; nay, worse yet, exercised on those within his immediate reach, on the best and most faithful of his own officers and servants, and ultimately on his nearest kinsmen—on his brothers, his sisters, his very mother—cruelties to which history, fortunately, supplies few parallels, I might almost say, taken in their totality, none. And yet it was for this man, sensualist, coward, tyrant, fratricide, ' matricide, that Paraguay lavished with scarce a murmur threefourths of her life blood; saw her men, women, and children exterminated by war, by disease, by famine, by misery of every kind, or carried off as slaves into distant bondage; saw her towns destroyed, her villages and fields wasted; her cattle harried, her wealth plundered to absolute bareness; nor even then submitted, only ceased to strive when she had practically, and for all national purposes, ceased to exist. More yet, were Lopez himself, in the worst anger of the infernal gods, to revive to-morrow on Paraguayan territory, his reappearance would, there is every reason to believe, at once rally round him the obedience and the devotion of a vast majority among the yet surviving inhabitants of the land.— Macmillan’s Magazine.