The Press. — London, England, 1856-08-09 00:00:00

~~4 magnificent trees are remorselessly burnt and sacrificed in clearings. From Rio he starts for the River Plate, and mentions, as a curious fact, giving instances of the same, that coal vessels in these latitudes are frequently burnt from spontaneous combustion. In due time be arrives at that misnamed place, Buenos Ayres. Rosas had not long been overthrown, Urquiza was in his place, the rivers were open, and a passage up the Parana just possible. Some of his sketches of Buenos Ayres are amusing as the first impressions of a young English mind unaccustomed to the wholesale slaughter of cattle and sights of blood and bones : Buenos Ayres! What a misnomer! The first thing that greet d our eyes on landing was the skinless carcase of a horse lying on the beach on one side cf the landing place ; the second, another ditto on the other side; and the " good air " of the town was the stench thereof. If Buenos Lyres is not the most disgusting place on this earth, there must be sickening spots indeed. The roads, from the late rain, were mere belts of mud with oc casional pools, with carcases of horses or oxen lying here and there, in the middle of the road and along the shore, everywhere ; the air was regularly thick with stench. The only variation from that of putrid flesh was that of burned bones. There are actually carcases and their remains in every stage of putridity, lying in the middle of the streets and before the doors of the houses in the outer parts of the town. This immense slaughter of cattle, he after wards remarks, deprives the people of all care for human as well as animal life. Certainly, in South America a man's throat is valued as little as a bullock's, and the cruelties of the late internecine wars fully bear us out in such an assertion. " How use doth breed a habit in a man !" From Urquiza, whom he describes as a frank, ruddy-faced, English-farmer-looking style of man, Mr. Mansfield obtained every facility to insure a safe visit to Paraguay, and shortly started on his trip up the rivers. Of the voyage up the Parana little need be said. Like all river voyages, it does not pre sent many striking features. The scenery varies from marshy flats to lofty barrancas and noble plains, coursed over by herds of horses and cattle, and dotted here and there with clumps of forest, or huge lagoons covered with myriads of wild duck. The river itself— studded with islands, of intricate navigation, with a down current rushing like a mill race, and with a breadth and depth varying from a couple of miles to half a mile across, and from ten fathoms to ten feet—is one of the noblest in the world. It is navigable for vessels of two hundred tons as far as Corrientes, eleven hundred miles from its mouth. The land on each side—a light, loamy soil—is of the most productive quality, but for thousands of square miles lies fallow, sighing for occupation and human labour. Mr. Mansfield, who writes in raptures of this noble river and magnificent country running to waste, cries boldly out for wholesale immigration. Colonisation in bodies upon the old Greek and Phoenician system is the only one which he declares will answer, and must be put in force : Now emigration as we see it in England is &heard— competition in its worst form, as a youth instead of as a dotard. We must do as the old Greeks and Phoenicians did, and as the bees still do,---colonise in bodies, and show too that we can set about it in a less amateur style than the Canterbury people have done. Fancy the capabilities of these lands, where they plant woods of peach-trees for firewood and to feed their pigs,— not because the fruit is not first rate, but because there are not men enough to eat it (or the men prefer swine's blood)! Olives too grow in great perfection at Buenos Ayres, and the vine luxuriates in the upper provinces, Mendoza and Tucuman. Here is a land of corn, oil, and wine ; and as for the honey, as if it was not enough that there should be a score of sorts of bees to make it, the very wasps brew delicious honey. The Banda Oriental and Entre Rios have the same capabilities as the plain of the west, with such other advantages as are given by a more undulating and broken ground, with a great deal of mineral wealth. Further north, in Corrientes and Para guay, you have the semi-tropical and tropical climates, where the richest oranges, sugar, coffee, tea, yerba maie (which, mind you, is not to be despised, and has yet to be sold at the co-operative stores in England), silk, and all the glories of a sun-blessed vegetation, are to be had for the asking. Then for intercommunication. In those Rarts where the country is hilly there is the best water-camage in the world ; and over the plains, what a country for railways ! Why, the whole Pampas ought to be furrowed with tram ways (not to speak of steam-locomotives, which they do not want yet) ; here is an empl o y men t f or t h e t h ousan d s of horses w hich are to be had and fed for nothing. All THE PRESS. the towns of the plain might lay down tramroads from one to the other, commencing with one from Salta to Buenos Ayres. The glorious timber of Paraguay will do for the trams; iron is not needed. Then he has great plans for the rivers per forming much of their own tug and agricul tural work themselves, and such like " dyna mical dreams," one day, perhaps, to be proved : I wonder rivers hare never been made to do their own tug work ; they have in locks to be sure, but that is a way of making them do the job only applicable on narrow waters, and then only for lifting, not for propelling. Of course the proper plan is to have stationary engines worked by wheels driven by the river itself, placed at convenient distances, with endless ropes running round pulleys, to which the craft bound up and down the river can attach themselves, and so be towed up and down stream at any pace. And so, too, vast floating factories might be es tablished on the Parana, where every kind of machinery should sing psalms of praise to the Great Father. This plan is at work on the Rhine, on a small scale, just below Mannheim: they have a few barges moored in the river, with water-wheels attached, and corn-mills within; but these are babytoys to what we may have here. The power available on this Parana is positively unlimited ; human hands need do no labour within hundreds of miles of its banks, however thickly they were populated. Here it rolls on, a mile all wide and at least three miles an hour in pace, of all depths, from five feet to twenty and upwards. All chat is wanted is a floating house, and leave to moor it in a good position, with as many great screw-propellers immersed, or feathering paddle•wheels dipping in the water, as may be necessary to take the power wanted from the stream. This is the future of these waters. Oh, what an enormous reservoir of force utterly wasted ! Verily the exuberant bounty of God is awful, and the idleness of man is ghastly. Just below the junction of the two rivers Parana and Paraguay, and about 1,100 mites up the former, lies Corrientes, a small town famous for pretty women, impossible needle work, lazy men who breakfast at noon, sleep or smoke away the rest of the day, and dine at ten p.m., a few Indians, ugly slate-coloured dogs with sharp snouts and no hair, and an incredible quantity of fleas and mosquitoes. The inha bitants, who pride themselves upon their pure Castilian blood, are very ignorant, very pri mitive, and very indolent. The climate is not remarkably hot, seldom beyond 88 deg. in summer and down to 55 deg. in winter, yet neither men nor women do much else but gossip, cultivate sufficient land to feed them selves, and kill, skin, and salt down as many cattle as will pay current expenses. The town itself is prettily situated, but the vitality of the place seems to lie in its_ vermin, from which Mr. Mansfield was only too glad to be liberated. After six weeks' detention, he at last got away, add made straight for Assump tion, the capital of Paraguay. He achieved the journey overland on horseback without much difficulty, and was much struck with the beauty of the rural landscape and the size of the men—a well developed, muscular race, far superior to the Correntinos—something over six feet without their shoes, with remarkably fine features and fair coin plexions. "It is the most curious thing," he writes, " this feature and complexion. In poor " cottages I have seen numerous children, " whom I should have supposed to be the " offspring of some high-bred English family, with delicately-cut features, rather long than " broad, and hair as fair as any Saxon." He is inclined to believe that the original Casti lians who peopled the country were of remark ably pure blood, and that the real old Northern Vandal is to be found in Paraguay. The people of Paraguay are poor and uneducated ; but their insular position and thorough seclu sion for the last forty years has fostered a true feeling of patriotism. The peasantry (says Mr. Mansfield) are a truly noble race; and Francia extirpated the aristocracy, so that classes are almost unknown. The country is healthy, but the people suffer from goitre. Mr. Mansfield does not tell us much more ; he merely describes the country, so far as lie saw it, as " the perfection of rural landscape ;" with land capable of growing anything, and with a warm, though fine and healthy, climate. The great curiosity of the place is the Chaco. a vast plain some nine hundred miles long by three hundred broad, on the opposite side of the river, and inhabited by a said-to•be untameable race of Guaycurus Indians, who originally took refuge in these plains at the time of the Spanish conquest. To this hour no attempt to conquer the Guaycurus has ever succeeded. To Mr. Mtatiiiiild the sight SATURDAY, of the Chaco suggested the idea of wholesale colonisation. He writes : Here are we, in a town of some 20,000 souls, and on the other side is the Chaco, wherein of these 20,000 not one dares set his foot. Can you conceive the looking from your window over a luxuriant desert, where not even a landlord or a gamekeeper ever treads,—where perhaps once a year a party of Indians may be been on horseback for a day or two, and then vanish? I can stand for hours and gaze from the hills here over that Chaco. There is about it an infinite mystery, which nothing that I have seen elsewhere approaches, except the sight of the starry heavens. To see this alone is to me worth having come all the way from England. But you cannot see it without coming here; for till you reach Assumption, or very little below it, there are no elevations of the land worthy of the name of hills, even on the occupied side, from which you can get a view; and if there were, till you get to Paraguay the river is too wide for you to see the scenery,—at least you would have no foreground to lead your eye into the distance, w ith a suggestion of what it is like. One thing, he declares, is abundantly clear to him : That the Gran Chaco is the yet empty cradle of a mighty nation : it must be the theatre of a new era in history—it is the place. Just cast your eye upon the map : just see the tract of land, in length from Santa Fe ten degrees of latitude northwards, and some six degrees of longitude in breadth from the Paraguay-Parana towards the west, and consider if it be not a marvel. A splendid country, pos. sessed by wild Indians alone, who live on nothing but wild beasts—men who, by their neglect of the earth, have for- feited their right to claim national property in it,—a wild garden, surrounded on all sides by provinces occupied, or pretended to be, occupied by Spanish tribes, none of whom dare set foot in this territory, and yet have the impudence to claim it as their own,—this territory isactually an untlis c3vered country. One white man's boat has descended ihe Bermejn, from Oran to the Paraguay; and the Bolivians are offering 4,0001. to any one who will bring the first boat up the Pilcomayo to them. It is just known that the rivers are or may easily be made navigable, and the rich verdure of the country is visible from the top of this house; and that is all that is known about it. A traditional enmity has ever existed between the Indians and those whose ancestors looked upon them only as material for slavery; but I firmly believe that Englishmen with some real Christianity in their souls would civilise them in some degree. At Corrientes they come across from the Chaco, and work bravely enough for those who will employ them. Of course they cut the Correntinos' throats if they come into the Chaco, because they suppose their visitors only come to enslave them ; and so they are said to be as treacherous as Satan 1 dare say they are treacherous enough, but not worse than the rest of man• kind. Whether or not the Indian race is to die out, there can be no doubt that it is our duty to do all we can to pre serve it, just as we do the life of an old relation whose disease may be mortal. But, besides the Chaco, there is the country of the Misiones, lying between the rivers Uruguay and Parana, wholly uninhabited, because no one up to '62 could agree to the ownership ; and so Correntinos, Paraguayans, and Banda Orientalists cut one another's throats for twenty years, and would let no one enter on the land. It has since been ceded to Corrientes : This district is now absolutely a desert so far as man is concerned; the rats have not even left their tails. The Brazilians, Paraguayans, and Correntinos have been fight• ing about it, pretty nearly, I suppose, ever since the Jesuits were expelled; and now, since I have been in these parts, they are going to settle the matter by ceding the territory to Corrientes. Every one says it is a beautiful country, — the choice of it by the Jesuits would be sufficient ground for believing so. This district must be colonised, and the present governor is very desirous that it should be. See what a position it is, nor forget the Socialist prestige which the Jesuits have given it,—the Parani always navigable, the Uruguay nearly always, and easily made so no doubt. Then again in Brazil, in the beautiful province of Rio Grande, colonisation by Germans has already been com menced : its climate and richness point it out as a neces sary position, and, to tell the truth, the pseudo-Imperial Government of Brazil would be a much pleasanter atmo sphere for a weak infant colony than any of the psuedo republics of the rivers. These views of colonisation are important and. thoughtful, and worthy of consideration. There is certainly no country in the world more adapted for colonisatioa, cultivation, and commerce than South America. It is truly the promised land of emigrants. Before it Canada, Central America, Africa, and Australia must give place; for they have neither soil, rivers, climate, nor country to compare to this vast continent, which lies almost unpopulated and unrecognised, in the centre of the south western half of the globe. With the most noble rivers, navigable for near two thousand miles from their mouths ; with every variety of soil highly productive; with a perfect climate; with magnificent plains, now covered with cattle and horses, and, beyond all agriculture 1 purposes, capable of depasturing millions f cattle, horses, and sheep, and producing the finest wool in the world ; with vast forests of