He established internal order under his autocracy. "Quarrels," he said, "paralyse industry, and injure the prosperity of the nation."
He created a Church and a Fatherland. To ensure his work, he expelled the Spaniards and isolated his country. He protected all foreigners who did not come from Spain, closed the ports to trade, and barred the rivers to free navigation.
His efforts were contradictory. He hated Spain; he wished to abolish the privileges of the nobility and clergy, and he restored the colonial system; he even aggravated it, giving it an unheard-of severity. He restored absolutism, commercial monopoly, and the communism of the Jesuits; there were estancias known as "the Country's," whose products satisfied the requirements of the budget. He unwillingly conceded licences to trade or navigate on the rivers; he opened great magazines, which recalled the colonial fairs, for the sale of merchandise. Paraguay existed in a condition of prodigious isolation; commercial transactions declined, and money went out of circulation.
During this time the population increased. The Dictator favoured Creoles, stimulated the crossing of Indian and foreign blood by severe measures, and carefully chose foreigners for the improvement of the Paraguayan population by means of forced unions; { 195} in this way he continued the work of the Jesuits. A homogeneous democracy, a national conscience, was gradually formed.
Like all the great American dictators, he stimulated material progress, and rebuilt Assomption, the capital city. He constructed public works, and forts to stop the encroachments of Indians, protected agriculture, and created industries. His ideal was full autonomy in an isolation possibly barbarous. By successive regulations he forced proprietors to sow their lands, to extend the cultivated area; like the Peruvian Incas, he would have none idle in his kingdom; he distributed tasks and enforced their execution.
He ruled from 1811 to 1840, a long thirty years, a period attained by no other American dictator but Rosas. His work was rude and imposing; he created a race, and freed his threatened country in every sense, political, economic, and religious. A priest said once in an ardent panegyric: "The Lord, having cast a pitying glance upon our country, sent us Dr. Francia to save it." The tyrant thus became a redeemer, and is not without his strange legend. At seventy years of age he was regarded as a remote and divine personage. From a secret palace he governed a disciplined people. He had militarised the country and exalted patriotism, the strong national feeling of small nations, from Uruguay and Paraguay in America and Servia, to Bulgaria and Montenegro in Europe.