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his polygamous instincts by the superabundance of women, his love affairs are frequent and free. As a result, society and the law recognise three classes of offspring-legitimate, illegitimate, and natural. The naturals' are those born of the liaison of unmarried parents; they are frequently taken into the man's subsequently acquired legitimate family and brought up as part of it, the mother in such cases being provided for. Illegitimate children are those born of a man's irregular connections after marriage; these are by law entitled to claim participation in the father's estate upon his death-a condition of affairs which provides much material for scandalous chronicles and profitable work for lawyers. Philoprogenitiveness is strongly marked in both sexes, so that, as in the East, sterility in a woman is commonly regarded as sufficient justification for her husband's contracting new relations. For the same reasons home life is seen at its best in Paraguayan families when the children are young.

At the same time, and in spite of the promiscuity of the peon's relations with women, the Spanish strain in his blood often invests his love affairs with a touch of the Quixotic and romantic quality, in which chivalry and insouciance are fitfully blended, as amongst the Gauchos. Fierce homicidal jealousy is in his veins; black moods impel him to swift revenge when balked of his heart's desire. Most of the tragedies that stand recorded in rude crosses by the wayside are tales of passionate intrigues and vendettas; for life is cheap in the primitive wilds of the yerbales, and the arm of the law as short as the memory of man. Often, indeed, the law is so framed and administered that it serves as a direct incentive to lawlessness.

To cite a typical case in point :—Last year, at one of the distant stations of the Industrial,' a mestizo carpenter became enamoured of the mayordomo's sister and, following the customary etiquette, asked permission to pay court to the lady, pour le bon motif. The mayordomo not only refused his consent, but persuaded the manager to have the man transferred to another station. The carpenter begged and protested, finally promising to abandon his suit; but the order was upheld and he was told to go. Concealing the vengeful rage to which his passion now turned, he feigned compliance; but on the day of his departure, he bribed a small Indian boy, belonging to the mayordomo's household, to put arsenic into the family's midday food. The mayor

domo died, and eleven other persons (his sister among them) barely escaped with their lives. The murderer went unpunished in the absence of direct evidence sufficient to satisfy the local comisario, who, as it happened, had a grudge of his own against the mayordomo. Thereupon the avenging of the latter's death was undertaken by one of the eleven victims, an Argentine of English descent, who promptly set forth in pursuit of the poisoner. Both disappeared into the silent depths of the wilderness. The mayordomo's brother took his place; his sister resumed her innocent glad eye and killing smile, and the tide of life flowed on, without a ripple of concern, over the scene of her devastating conquest. Incidents of this kind, that would furnish three days' headlines even in Chicago, scarcely evoke comment in the newssheets of Asuncion.

With all their sins of omission and commission, the Paraguayans, like most of the descendants of Spanish Indian ancestors, are nevertheless a sympathetic, not to say a lovable, race. Their morals, like those of many other people, are a matter of latitude and longitude-chiefly latitude. But their history proves clearly that, given good government administered by honest men, they possess the makings of very decent and useful citizens. Recognising this fact, and the obvious impossibility of their ever achieving either civic decency or economic progress under their existing social and political conditions, the sympathetic observer can only ask himself, What reasonable prospect is there of anything better being evolved out of the political elements at present active, or latent, in the State?

According to the politicians themselves, peace and prosperity await the nation at the cross-roads of the next revolution-it is always the next. But experience has proved them to be lying prophets; the record of the caudillos is one long-drawn tale of sordid ambition and useless strife. There has been vitality and to spare, and much bloodshed, but neither discipline, unity, nor organised effort of any kind. All that has been evolved out of political chaos, confusion and crime since 1870 is a parasitical bureaucracy, blind leaders of the blind. What, then? Dictatorshipin which South American writers like Garcia Calderon see the best hope of stability-can only afford temporary relief; it may repress, but can never eradicate, the permanent causes

of disorganisation. Even the strongest of dictators can never hope to re-make the society which has made him at best, he may dominate it for a time.

Amalgamation with progressive Argentina would probably solve most of the country's pressing material problems, and if it were not for the vested interests of demagogues and politicians it might be possible to persuade the Paraguayan people that such a solution would be all to their advantage. As matters actually stand, however, the process of geographical and sentimental gravitation inclines rather towards Brazil, in which quarter there lies no possible hope of moral or material salvation.

Finally, there is the possibility of gradual improvement of the country's political and economic conditions by means of European immigration. Already there are some 15,000 Italian settlers, of the industrious agricultural class, in the Republic, and the Government perceives dimly that their productive industry should be a source of strength to the state. Yet these workers, and still more so the Anglo-Saxons (as the pastoral experiment of the New Australia' Colony has proved), have hitherto found that the attractions of the country, as at present administered, wane upon closer acquaintance. So long as Argentina and Uruguay offer better security for life and property, the fertile plains and rich forest lands of Paraguay are likely to continue in their present rudimentary state of development, for want of capital and labour. But the increasing needs of this congested planet in the matter of its daily bread, and the industrial world's fierce competition for raw materials, are such that, pace the Monroe doctrine and all other artificial obstructions, it is impossible to conceive that a land like this should continue to be much longer the barren stamping-ground for the wild asses of politics. Either by force of immigration or geographical gravitation it must be redeemed to purposes of economic usefulness. Will the Guarany people go under in the process, as Lopez would have had them go, fighting as driven slaves in the name of Liberty and Justice'? Or will they perish, slowly and silently, of caña and competition, leaving no memory of their race except the haunting music of their rivers' names?

J. O. P. BLAND.

THE PERIL OF HUBRIS

N the morrow of the war of 1870 Friedrich Nietzsche

ON

wrote:

'Of all the evil results due to the last contest with France, the most deplorable, perhaps, is that widespread and almost universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that German culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now therefore be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary defeats and successes. This error is in the highest degree pernicious not because it is an error-for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed-but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. A defeat ?—I should say, rather, into the uprooting of the "German mind " for the benefit of the "German Empire."

We are now witnessing the fulfilment of this prophecy. Nietzsche shows that the degradation of Germany, revealed so catastrophically to the world by the events of August 1914, is a product, not of to-day or yesterday, but of gradual and farreaching changes, perceptible nearly half a century ago. For the majority of Englishmen, with their thoughts concentrated on the present conflict, these changes raise no intellectual problem. They are the mark of the beast-and nothing more. It is otherwise for those who, in days gone by, learned to reverence the great masters of German thought. They have to face the question of reconciling their conviction of the past service rendered by those thinkers to civilisation with the equally strong conviction, born of the present war and its antecedents, of the moral and intellectual perversion of the German mind. How comes it, they needs must ask, that a people whose thinkers a century ago were pre-eminent in their disinterested passion for truth have been led to prostitute their spiritual energy to the gospel of national self-aggrandisement?

It is unquestionably a gospel that has won possession of modern Germany. We speak of the Germans as Huns; but the analogy scarcely does credit to our knowledge of history. The Germans, like the Huns, have strewn their path with destruction; but, whereas the Huns were mere destroyers,

destruction for the Germans is a means and not an end. The Mahommedans, imposing the Koran by the sword, furnish a more felicitous comparison. To the student of history the alliance between the German and the Turk is the outcome of more than political opportunism. There is a real affinity between the motives prompting to the outrages in Belgium and the Armenian massacres. Doubtless there are those in Germany for whom war is an end in itself, as there are those whose aim in fighting is to win a monopoly of the world's markets, or to rid their country of menace from the Slav. But neither militarism nor lust of wealth nor dread of Russia suffices to explain the allegiance of thinking minds in Germany to a policy of national aggression. For them war is but an instrument to the triumph of German culture. They believe themselves to be fighting for an ideal. Their dream is of a European civilisation which shall flourish under the pax Germanica and move forward from strength to strength under the leadership of German literature, German art, and German science. The magnificent conception of a Catholic Empire, which dazzled the thinkers and poets of the Middle Age, shall at length be realised under the aegis of the Hohenzollern monarchy. What was then a theoretic vision shall presently be translated into fact.

Like all gospels, this of modern Germany has its prophets and its preachers. The world has been deluged in these latter days with propaganda, issuing not only from sources directly inspired by the German government, but from the universities and the public press, professors, pamphleteers, and journalists vying one with the other to herald the reign of German culture. The level of thought in these manifestoes rarely rises above mediocrity; being the work not of original thinkers but of disciples, they presuppose and reflect the opinions of an already converted public. We must look farther back for the true authors of the gospel. They are to be found principally in that school of historians which rose to eminence after the political crisis of 1848 and is known, from its uncompromising advocacy of the claims of Prussia, as the Prussian school of history. Its most influential member, Heinrich Treitschke, was the prophet par excellence of modern Germany. The effects of Treitschke's teaching were strengthened from a very different quarter. Nietzsche, as can be clearly inVOL. 225. NO. 460.

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