Under a bower of calico and lace

is quite lost. are seated every kind of little figure that can be collected: the centre of the background is occupied by a doll which represents the Virgin, and all around are the stupid little figures, which look as if they were gleaned from the toy-shop of some remote country village in England. There were grotesque little images of Oliver Cromwell and Robin Hood, with an apostle or two, and little dogs mounted on squeaking bellows, with little patches of live grass dotted about among them, and candles to illuminate. The visitors' room is crowded with spectators who sit and gaze in admiration on the motionless spectacle, and every now and then break out into a melancholy chant, which I suppose is meant for some act of reveIf this was seen in a newly-discovered country, I suppose it would be set down as the worshipping of their idols.

rence.

What else it can be set down as now, is difficult to define. Certainly, setting this and similar facts by the side of miraculous images and winking pictures, and cures by relics, we know no facts recorded of any ancient idolatry more grossly sensuous than those of the modern Romish and Greek churches. All attempts to draw any distinctions between the heathen and the quasi-Christian creed on these points have, it is to be feared, failed utterly; and every excuse or explanation now offered by modern priests for the abomination, has been offered long ago by those of Greece, Egypt, and Rome, and by their Neo-platonist partisans.

The spectators (continues Mr. Mansfield) consist chiefly of Chinás, or women of the lower order: but the ladies of the higher families go about to see them as an amusement; and not, I fancy, without much gratification.

Couple this with the frightful fact that at the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, the Indians of their boasted Reductions relapsed at once into barbarism and heathendom, proving thus the utter absence of any selfsupporting vitality,—any real 'regeneration unto life'in the Jesuit system; and all we can say of Popery, which daily boasts of its fresh conquests and approaching triumphs, is, that in the very country in which its power has been most unlimited, and least disturbed by external

enemies, that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.'

Paraguay is, as might be supposed, the paradise of smokers. Every one smokes-even at a lady's funeral (where a mulatto-man chants through his nose the whole Latin service, in nothing but a shirt and drawers, with a green baize poncho, and much spitting on the pavement; Mr. Mansfield' never saw such a scoundrelly-looking set of fellows as the priests who officiated'), and the chief mourner prepares for the procession by sticking a cigar in his mouth. 'Even the young ladies' of the upper dozen,' who refrain in public, smoke vigorously when alone, at all hours and places; and the tobacco is scarcely, if at all, inferior to that of Havannah.'

Picturesque, lazy, cheerful people they seem-content enough with 'the stationary state' in a country where the necessaries of life may be had for the asking, and quite unaware (and small blame to them) that to remain in the stationary state, in the midst of such a country, while all the nations round them are struggling for the means of existence, is a national sin, because a national selfishness-a burying in the earth the talent allotted to them. For surely a moral duty lies on any nation, who can produce far more than sufficient for its own wants, to supply the wants of others from its own surplus. No one, of course, is Quixotic enough to expect a people to condemn itself to unnecessary labour for mere generosity's sake, and to give away what they might sell but the human species has a right to demand (what the Maker thereof demands also, and enforces the demand by very fearful methods), that each people should either develop the capabilities of their own country, or make room for those who will develop them. If they accept that duty, they have their reward in the

renovation of blood, which commerce, and its companion, colonization, are certain to bring; and in increased knowledge, which involves increased comfort, and increased means of supporting population. If they refuse it, they punish themselves by their own act. They discover (or rather the world discovers by their example) that national isolation is only national degradation; that the stationary state exists only on paper, and is, in practice and fact, a state of steady deterioration, physical and moral; that to refuse to take their place in the commonweal of humanity, and their share of the burdens of humanity, is to cut themselves off from all that humanity has learned and gained, by hard struggles and bitter lessons; to leave the national intellect fallow, and thereby give more and more scope to the merely animal passions; till, frivolous and sensual, the race sinks into the dotage of second childhood: but not self-contented or at peace. To a race in this state, most fearfully is fulfilled the world-wide law-' He that saveth his life shall lose it.' Nowhere will life and property be so insecure, as among those peoples who care for nothing but life and property, and who say, with folded hands-' Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' For over the lazy brute-Arcadia sweep surely terrible storms; their weakness makes them a prey (as the Paraguayans have been) to tyrant after tyrant. Nay, even tyranny itself may be a benefit to them; and the capricious and half-insane dictatorship of a Francia may be the necessary means (as it was in Paraguay from 1820 to 1840) of developing the agriculture and the manufactures of a lazy and debauched race, and thereby giving increased means of subsistence to thousands who must otherwise either have starved, or have gradually sunk into the condition. of savage and godless squatters in the fertile wilderness.

The terrible lesson, that no price was too high to pay for industry and order, even of the roughest kind, which Francia taught the Paraguayans, seems not to have been lost upon them; and their conduct since his death in 1840, has formed an honourable contrast to that of the other South American republics. The general features of this improvement may be read in Mr. Mansfield's volume, pp. 458-463; and the new policy of the republic, which admitted strangers, whom Francia had so jealously excluded, was practically inaugurated in 1853, by the opening of the river Paraguay (which the jealousy of Rosas had long kept closed) to British ships as far as Assuncion. A treaty between Brazil and Paraguay has just made Assuncion the thoroughfare for the enormous mineral wealth of the western Brazil; but nothing, it seems, can permanently protect Paraguay from those miseries which have desolated every State of South America for the last forty years, save the introduction of a sturdy race of European and American colonists, protected by the strong arms of their civilized mother-countries, from the intrigue, caprice, ignorance, and brutality of the surrounding military despots for the time being. Let us trust that the alliance formed between Paraguay and England, France, the United States, and Sardinia, will not remain waste paper: but that if'intervention' be needed, intervention will be boldly employed, to protect both the Paraguayans and the new colonists against the machinations of those surrounding States, whose political career has been marked by nothing but blood, as the many have been butchered periodically for the sake of the ambition and cupidity of the few, and their hired myrmidons. Let the European nations, or the United States, once become fully alive to the enormous capabilities of Paraguay, and self-interest

will make them interfere with a strong hand to put down that suicidal anarchy, which they now only regard with contempt: but which they will then begin to fear and hate, as a curse and a hindrance to the progress of the human commonweal. And, meanwhile, may the kindly Paraguayans enjoy themselves, as best they can, in their simple picturesque way, till the fastapproaching day shall come, when play shall be at an end, and work begin.