rough tropical swamps
and forests. Inch by inch he contested their entry upon Paraguayan
soil. When the able-bodied men gave out, old men, boys, women, and girls
fought on with stubborn fury, and died before they would surrender. The
wounded escaped if they could, or, cursing their captors, tore off
their bandages and bled to death. Disease wrought awful havoc in all the
armies engaged; yet the struggle continued until flesh and blood could
endure no more. Flying before his pursuers into the wilds of the north
and frantically dragging along with him masses of fugitive men, women,
and children, whom he remorselessly shot, or starved to death, or left
to perish of exhaustion, Lopez turned finally at bay, and, on March 1,
1870, was felled by the lance of a cavalryman. He had sworn to die for
his country and he did, though his country might perish with him.

No land in modern times has ever reached a point so near annihilation as
Paraguay. Added to the utter ruin of its industries and the devastation
of its fields, dwellings, and towns, hundreds of thousands of men,
women, and children had perished. Indeed, the horrors that had befallen
it might well have led the allies to ask themselves whether it was worth
while to destroy a country in order to change its rulers. Five years
before Lopez came into power the population of Paraguay had been
reckoned at something between 800,000 and 1,400,000--so unreliable were
census returns in those days. In 1878 it was estimated at about 230,000,
of whom women over fifteen years of age outnumbered the men nearly four
to one. Loose polygamy was the inevitable consequence, and women became
the breadwinners. Even today in this country the excess of females over
males is very great. All in all, it is not strange that Paraguay should
be called the "Niobe among nations."

Unlike many nations of Spanish America in which a more or less
anticlerical regime was in the ascendant, Ecuador fell under a sort
of theocracy. Here appeared one of the strangest characters in a story
already full of extraordinary personages--Gabriel Garcia Moreno,
who became President of that republic in 1861. In some respects the
counterpart of Francia of Paraguay, in others both a medieval mystic
and an enlightened ruler of modern type, he was a man of remarkable
intellect, constructive ability, earnest patriotism, and disinterested
zeal for orderliness and progress. On his presidential sash were
inscribed the words: "My