He would be no real friend of Uruguay who strove to show that the march of the country has not been rudely arrested on innumerable occasions. Indeed, were it not for the conditions that have prevailed for centuries, the actual forward steps that the Republic has effected would be far less remarkable than is in reality the case. The history of Uruguay reveals a continuous medley of peace and war. Its swords have been beaten into ploughshares and welded back again into lethal weapons ere the metal had cooled from the force of the former operation. Each series of such transformations, moreover, has occurred at intervals sufficiently short to destroy utterly the hopes and prosperity of an ordinary people. Over and over again the Uruguayans have strewn the battlefields with their dead; yet during each interval they have continued to plant the soil with its proper and more profitable seed. An extraordinary vitality on the part of the people joined to the natural wealth of the land have been the factors by means of which the small Republic has brushed away the results of its wars as lightly as though such convulsions were summer showers. The history of Uruguay reveals an admirable amount of pure heroism. Apart from the fighting merits that are inborn and natural to the race, the most unsympathetic reader of its past pages cannot deny to it the innumerable instances of self-sacrifice that were the fruit of loftier ideals. Of the many vivid battle scenes that were painted in too deadly an earnest against their neighbours and even amongst themselves, there are few that are not relieved by some illuminating act of heroism, for all the utter ferocity and courage by which these conflicts were wont to be marked. Uruguay, in fact, was something of a South American Switzerland; but a Switzerland bereft of the lofty peaks and mountain tops that assisted the men of the Cantons against the Austrians, endowed, moreover, with a more restless and undisciplined folk of its own. Yet in many respects the resemblance holds good, and for one reason most of all. The Orientales rested not until they had won their freedom. Not once but several times they were forced to wrest it from the stranger ere it finally became secure.