To enter into the details of individual cases is impossible here, since volumes could be written on every separate decade, and on a score and more of the personalities of this particular epoch in Argentina alone. Paraguay stood out as an exception to the rest. In that State the reins of power fell into the hands of Dr. Francia, a merciless autocrat, who suffered nothing whatever to be disturbed within the frontiers of his country, and who now ruled with a ferocious tyranny, such as had scarcely been approached even in the darkest days of the early colonial age. After that Paraguay was destined to undergo its baptism of fire as well as the rest; the process seemed inevitable. In Paraguay it had not been avoided; it had merely been postponed. CHAPTER XXIII THE REPUBLIC OF PERU With the end of the Spanish power the centres of importance--hitherto quite arbitrarily and artificially chosen--tended to drift to their natural situations. From time to time it is true that the balance continued to be disturbed by political considerations, but in the main the true order of progress was permitted to proceed unchecked. Thus the importance of Peru fell to its intrinsic and industrial level, and the States of the north, artificially buoyed up for generations as these had been by the Spaniards, now assumed a secondary place in the affairs of the Continent. Each State, in fact, had now to rely upon its own population and resources alone. Of the number there were few enough who were not generously provided with the latter; it was in the former asset that so many were found acutely wanting, of course through no fault of their own. Thus it was that when the new division of territories took place, many of those countries which Nature had provided with an almost extraordinary degree of wealth found themselves in a state of poverty through the mere want of labour which might develop these resources. In some cases this disadvantage has been overcome to a greater or lesser extent; in others the situation continues practically unaltered to the present day. In the north, as has been said, the era of chaos was not long in asserting itself. New Granada had been divided into three Republics, those of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador; while the new State of Bolivia had been set up between the frontiers of Paraguay and Peru. General Sucre, one of the chief military heroes of the war of liberation in the north, was, appropriately enough, made the first President of this new Republic of Bolivia. At the start unease and fretfulness marked the relations of each of the new States with the others. It seemed almost as if the Continent had become so imbued with warlike ideas that it had forgotten how to lay down the sword.