In 1878 it was estimated at about 230,000, of whom women over fifteen years of age outnumbered the men nearly four to one.

Loose polygamy was the inevitable consequence, and women became the breadwinners.

Even today in this country the excess of females over males is very great.

All in all, it is not strange that Paraguay should be called the "Niobe among nations." Unlike many nations of Spanish America in which a more or less anticlerical regime was in the ascendant, Ecuador fell under a sort of theocracy.

Here appeared one of the strangest characters in a story already full of extraordinary personages--Gabriel Garcia Moreno, who became President of that republic in 1861.