Note 1 — EXPLANATORY PREFACE.

In reference to the preponderating interest of Liverpool in this trade, an influential metropolitan journalist, commenting on the treaty with Paraguay soon after its ratification in London, observes:—

Liverpool is the very centre and focus of our foreign trade. There almost every man you meet is either engaged in commerce, or is in the service of those so engaged. Liverpool, like the seat of the Pope of Rome—but in a widely different sense—has its agents and its commercial missionaries in every climate and in every latitude, and there is not one among them who is not as intent and energetic in his work as those ‘soldiers of the faith,’ whom Rome sent out on the South American missions in the two centuries from 1535 to 1735. The fiery enthusiasm of Don Pedro de Mendoza himself, who offered Charles V. to complete the conquest of Paraguay and the Rio de la Plata at his own expense, is equalled by some of those indomitable agents of the counting-house, who are as zealous for commercial conquests as the Andalusian Hidalgo was for the aggrandisement of his Sovereign and master. We doubt that even Father Charlevoix himself, so often cited and praised by his brother Breton, Chateaubriand, and who has given us six volumes of a charming history of Paraguay—which he explored in person—exhibited more zeal for the interests of his order in the countries watered by the Rio de la Plata, the Rio Salado, the Rio Negro, the Catapuliche, and the Rio de la Encarnacion, than do those Liverpool junior partners, clerks, and supercargoes, who are charged with the interests of considerable commercial houses in such distant latitudes.… Through the rivers opened to us by the efforts of Lord Malmesbury, one-fourth, at least, of the produce of South America, must be brought to the market of the world, and of this commerce Liverpool will certainly have the largest, and Bristol, Glasgow, and London, a considerable share.