Certainly Lopez was utterly free from any dread of holocaust. In a very short while the prisons had been filled to overflowing, and the red soil of Paraguay grew redder with the blood of hundreds of executions. Once again the barriers began to be set up between Paraguay and the outer world, and once again it became almost impossible for one who had crossed its frontiers to return to his native land. But, since it was the fate of Lopez to have lived in a later age than Francia, the ambitions of this third Dictator were correspondingly enlarged. It was not his design ultimately to shut off Paraguay from the rest of the Continent; it was his plan rather to cause the frontiers of his country to spread until they had enveloped all the other lands. Thus he considered he was acting in conformity with the true Napoleonic tradition, and also, incidentally, with his own desires and dreams. In order to be prepared for the great day which was to come to Paraguay, the army was increased, trained, and drilled until it became one of the most important and efficient military organizations in the Continent. This army was completely and entirely the toy of Lopez. The men were his to be shot or promoted at his slightest whim, and the officers were subjected to precisely the same irresponsible but merciless discipline. Even at this period in no other country of South America, perhaps, would such a state of affairs have continued. Paraguay, however, as has been explained, differed in its ethics from any of the neighbouring States. The population was largely composed of civilized Guarani Indians, and the section of this great family in these latitudes had from the earliest days of the Continent been noted for its easy-going and somewhat indolent qualities. The result of the intercourse between the Spaniards and Indians had produced a small minority of _mestizos_, whose enterprise scarcely exceeded that of the natives. The soft and enervating climate was, of course, largely responsible for this; indeed, it was inevitable that a beautiful and lotus-eating land of the kind should have produced inhabitants to match. A few only of the Paraguayans had had the advantage of travelling in Europe, and on their return to their native land its atmosphere very seldom permitted them to remain for long without the local and somewhat demoralizing influences. Had Lopez been content to continue to act as supreme and all-powerful lord of every man and thing within his own frontiers, the affairs of Paraguay, enlivened at intervals by those salutary orgies of executions, might have drowsed on indefinitely. For a man of the temperament of Francisco Solano Lopez such comparative repression was impossible. He had dreamed himself Emperor of South America, and this he was determined to be.