Chapter VIICauses of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits of the priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to slavery—Their system of administrationMuch has been written of the interior government of the missions by the Jesuits, but chiefly by strong partisans, for and against, on either side, whose only object was to make out a case to fit the prejudices of those for whom they wrote. Upon the Jesuit side the Abbé Muratori[204]describes a paradise. A very Carlo Dolce amongst writers, with him all in the missions is so cloying sweet that one’s soul sickens, and one longs in his ‘Happy Christianity’ to find a drop of gall. But for five hundred pages nothing is amiss; the men of Belial persecute the Jesuit saints, who always (after the fashion of their Order and mankind) turn both cheeks to the smiter, and, if their purse is taken, hasten to give up their cloaks. The Indians are all love and gratitude. No need in the Abbé’s pages for the twelve pair of fetters, which Brabo most unkindly has set down amongst his inventories. Never a singlelapsusfrom the moral rule the Jesuits imposed—no drunkenness, and bigamy so seldom met with that it would seem that Joseph Andrews had been a swaggerer judged by the standard of these moral Guaranís. Then comes Ibañez,[205]the ex-Jesuit, on the other side. In a twinkling of an eye the scene is changed. For, quite in Hogarth’s vein, he paints the missions as a perpetual march to Finchley, and tells us that the Indians were savages, and quite unchanged in all their primitive propensities under the Jesuit rule. And for the Jesuits themselves he has a few home-truths administered with vinegar, after the fashion of the renegade the whole world over, who sees nothing good in the society that has turned him out. He roundly says the Jesuits were loafers, accuses them of keeping the Indians ignorant for their own purposes, and paints them quite as black as the Abbé Muratori painted them rose colour, and with as little art. So that, as usually happens in the writings of all polemists, no matter upon which side they may write, but little information, and that distorted to an incredible degree, is all that they afford.In general, curious as it may appear, the bitterest opponents of the Jesuits were Catholics, and Protestants have often written as apologists. Buffon, Raynal, and Montesquieu, with Voltaire, Robertson, and Southey, have written favourably of the internal government of the missions and the effect which it produced. No other names of equal authority can be quoted on the other side; but yet the fact remains that the Jesuits in Paraguay were exposed to constant calumny from the first day they went there till the last member of the Order left the land.It is my object first to try to show what the conditions of their government really were, and then to try and clear up what was the cause of unpopularity, and why so many and such persistent calumnies were laid to their account. Stretching right up and down the banks of both the Paraná and Uruguay, the missions extended from Nuestra Senora de Fé[206](or Santa Maria), in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul; and from the mission of Corpus, on the east bank of the Paraná, to Yapeyú, upon the Uruguay. The official capital was placed at Candelaria, on the east bank of the Paraná. In that town the Superior of the missions had his official residence, and from thence he ruled the whole territory, having not only the ecclesiastical but the temporal power, the latter, from the position in which he was placed, so many hundred miles from any Spanish Governor, having by degrees gradually come into his hands. The little town of La Candelaria was, when I knew it, in a most neglected state. The buildings of the Jesuits, with the exception of the church, were all in ruins. The streets were sandy and deserted, the foot-walk separated from them by a line of hard-wood posts, which, as tradition said, were left there by the Jesuits; but the hard woods of Paraguay are almost as imperishable as iron.Abalsa—that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable—plied fitfully across the Paraná to Ytapua, also a little ex-Jesuit town upon the other side. Each shop had a sign outside, as was the case in England a hundred years ago. Indians supplied the place with vegetables, floating down in canoes piled up with fruit, with flowers, with sweet potatoes, and returning home empty, or for their cargo three or four tin pails, a looking-glass, or other of the marvels which Europe sends as a sample of her manufactures to little frontier towns. All was as quiet, or perhaps much quieter than in the time when the Superior of the Jesuits was in residence, and if it had been necessary, during the hot hours of noon, Godivas by the dozen might have ridden down the streets, had they been able to find horses quiet enough to ride, certain that no one in the town would lose his after-breakfast nap to look at them.In every mission two chosen Jesuits lived. The elder, selected for his experience of the country and knowledge of the tongue from amongst those who had been rectors of colleges or provincials of the Order, was vested with the civil power, and was responsible direct to the Superior. The second, generally styled companion (el Compañero), acted as his lieutenant, and had full charge of all things spiritual; so that they were a check on one another, and their duties did not clash.In difficulties the Superior transmitted orders, like a general in the field, by mounted messengers, who frequently rode over a hundred miles a day, relays of horses always being kept ready for emergencies every three leagues upon the road.From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the territory, most of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks which were the only thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to Corrientes, to Asuncion, others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay were about eighty posts, all guarded, and with horses ready to equip the messengers. But there were also roads in the district of the Upper Paraná, which I myself remember as a wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers roamed about and Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of a blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In the districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in which they carriedyerba[207]and the other products of the land. Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads branching out on every side, and their relays of post-horses at intervals, most probably no State of America at the time had such interior means of communication with the seat of government. The Incas and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried messages and brought up fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the Spanish colonies contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had fallen into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas used in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks to send a letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance democratic—that is to say, there were officials, as mayors[208]and councillors; but most of them were named by the Jesuits, and all of them, even although elected, owed their election entirely to their priests. This sort of thought-suggested representation was the most fitting for the Indians at the time,[209]and those who look into the workings of a County Council of to-day cannot but think at times that the majority of the councillors would have been better chosen had the electorate had the benefit of some controlling hand, though from what quarter it is difficult to see. The problem which most writers on the Jesuits have quite misunderstood, is how two Jesuits were able to keep a mission of several thousand Indians in order, and to rule supreme without armed forces, or any means of making their power felt or of enforcing obedience to their decrees. Undoubtedly, the dangerous position in which the Indians stood, exposed on one side to the Paulistas, and on the other to the Spanish settlers, both of whom wished to take them as their slaves, placed power in the Jesuits’ hands: for the Indians clearly perceived that the Jesuits alone stood between them and instant slavery. Most controversialists who have opposed the Jesuits assert that the Indians of the missions were, in reality, half slaves. Nothing is further from the truth, if one consults the contemporary records, and remembers the small number of the Jesuits. The work the Indians did was inconsiderable, and under such conditions as to deprive it of much of the toilsomeness which is incident to any kind of work. The very essence of a slave’s estate is being obliged to work without remuneration for another man. Nothing was farther from the Indians than such a state of things. Their work was done for the community, and though the Jesuits, without doubt, had the full disposition of all the money earned in commerce,[210]and of the distribution of the goods, neither the money nor the goods were used for self-aggrandisement, but were laid out for the benefit of the community at large. The total population of the thirty towns is variously estimated from one hundred and forty to one hundred and eighty thousand,[211]and, curiously enough, it remained almost at the same figure during the whole period of the Jesuit rule. This fact has been adduced against the Jesuits, and it has been said that they could not have been good rulers, or the population must have increased; but those who say so forget that the Indians of Paraguay were never in great numbers, and that most writers on the wild tribes, as Dobrizhoffer[212]and Azara, remark their tendency never to increase.All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been seen, by a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing of any European force, and being almost always on bad terms with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made against the enslaving of the Indians, had no means of coercion at their command. Hence the Indians must have been contented with their rule, for if they had not been so the Jesuits possessed no power to stop them from returning to their savage life. Azara,[213]although in the main an opponent of the Jesuits, in the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of to-day would oppose anything of a Socialistic tendency, yet has this most significant passage in their favour. After enumerating the amount of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he says ‘en faisant le bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque excédant, il était en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’[214]Seldom enough does such a result take place when the balance is struck to-day in any country between the rulers and their ‘taxables’. Following their system of perfect isolation from the world to its logical sequence, the Jesuits surrounded all the territories of their different towns with walls and ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent egress or ingress between the missions and the outer world.[215]Much capital has been made out of this, as it is attempted to be shown that the Indians were thereby treated as prisoners in their own territories. Nothing, however, has been said of the fact that, if the ditches, palisades, and guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the effect of keeping the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as without reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used but as a stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in police-courts, when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises his eyes to heaven, and then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his thumb.It will be seen that the communism of the missions was of a limited character, and, though the land was cultivated by the labour of the community, that the products were administered by the Jesuits alone. Though it has been stated by many polemical writers, such as Ibañez and Azara, and more recently by Washburne, who was American Minister in Paraguay during the war with Brazil and the Argentine Republic (1866-70), that the Jesuits had amassed great wealth in Paraguay, no proof has ever been advanced for such a charge. Certainly Cardenas made the same statement, but it was never in his power to bring any confirmation of what he said. This power alone was in the hands of Bucareli (1767), the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the expulsion of the Jesuits was carried out. By several extracts from Brabo’s inventories, and by the statement of the receivers sent by Bucareli, I hope to show that there was no great wealth at any time in the mission territory, and that the income was expended in the territory itself. It may be that the expenditure on churches was excessive, and also that the money laid out on religious ceremonies was not productive; but the Jesuits, strange as it may appear, did not conduct the missions after the fashion of a business concern, but rather as the rulers of some Utopia—those foolish beings who think happiness is preferable to wealth.Nothing can give a better idea of the way of life of a Jesuit priest and of his daily labours than the curious letter of Nicolas Ñeenguiru, originally written in Guaraní, but of which a translation is extant in the National Spanish Archives in Simancas:[216]‘The manner of living of the father is to shut all the doors, and remain alone with his servant and his cook (who are Indians of a considerable age), and these only wait on him; but by day only, and at twelve o’clock, they go out, and an old man has care of the porter’s lodge, and it is he who shuts the gate when the father is asleep, or when he goes out to see his cultivated ground, and even then they go alone, except it be with an old Indian, who guides them and attends to the (father’s) horse; and after that he goes to Mass, and in the evening to the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, calling us together by the sound of the bell, and before that he calls the boys and girls with a small bell, and after that the good father begins to teach them doctrine and how to cross themselves. In the same way, on every feast day, he preaches to us the Word of God, in the same way the Holy Sacrament of Penitence and of the Communion; in these things does the good Father employ himself, and every night the porter’s lodge is closed, and the key taken to the Father’s room, which is only opened in the morning in order that the sacristan and the cooks may enter. . . .‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to their rooms, and then they take some hot water andyerba(maté), and nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and then all those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he goes out to see if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and afterwards they go to their room to read the divine service for the day in his book, and to pray that God may prosper him in all his affairs. At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little, not to eat much, for he only has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not filling a little glass; and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in our town, except that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which the Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . . . After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the church; afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is resting those who work in the father’s house go out, and those who do any kind of indoor work, and also the sacristan and the cook: all these go out, and as long as the bell does not ring the doors are shut, and only an old man guards the gate, and when they ring the bell again he opens the doors so that those who work indoors may go inside, and the father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening they ring the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in to teach them Christian doctrine.’Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in Guaraní, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting and simple as that I have transcribed.Dobrizhoffer, in his history of the Abipones, says of him that he was a simple Indian, whom often he had seen put in the stocks for petty faults; at any rate, he seems to have been one of those Indians whom the Jesuits had at least favourably impressed by the system they employed. After the manner in which he wrote, hundreds of Indians must have thought, or else the missions, placed as they were, surrounded on all sides by enemies, could not have endured a single day. What was it, then, which raised the Jesuits up so many and so powerful enemies in Paraguay, when in the districts of the Moxos[217]and the Chiquitos where their power was to the full as great, amongst the Indians, they never had a quarrel with the Spaniards till the day they were expelled? Many and various causes contributed to all they underwent, but most undoubtedly two reasons must have brought about their fall.Since the time of Cardenas, the report that the Jesuits had rich mines, which they worked on the sly, had been persistently on the increase. Although disproved a thousand times, it still remained; even to-day, in spite of ‘science’ and its wonderful discoveries, there are many in Paraguay who cherish dreams of discovering Jesuit mines. Humanity loves to deceive itself, although there are plenty ready to deceive it; and if men can both forge for themselves fables and at the same time damage their neighbours in so doing, their pleasure is intense. I take it that many really believed the stories of the mines, being unable to credit that anyone would live far from the world, surrounded but by Indians, for any other reason than to be rich. But let a country have rich minerals, even if they exist but in imagination, and it becomes a crime against humanity to shut it up. So that it would appear one of the reasons which induced hatred against the Jesuits was the idea that they had enormous mineral wealth, which either they did not work or else worked in secret for the benefit of their society.The other reason was the question of slavery. Once get it well into your head that you and yours are ‘reasoning men’[218](gente de razon), and that all coloured people are irrational, and slavery follows as a natural sequence; for ‘reasoning men’ have wit to make a gun, and on the gun all reason takes it stand. From the first instant of their arrival in America, the Jesuits had maintained a firm front against the enslavement of the Indians. They may have had their faults in Europe, and in the larger centres of population in America; but where they came in contact with the Indians, theirs was the sole voice raised upon their side.In 1593 Padre Juan Romero, sent from Peru as Superior to Paraguay, on his arrival gave up an estate (with Indians inencomienda) which his predecessors had enjoyed, alleging that he did not wish to give the example of making profit out of the unpaid labour of the Indians,[219]and that without their work the estate was valueless.On many occasions, notably in the time of Cardenas, the Jesuits openly withstood all slavery, and amongst the concessions that Ruiz Montoya obtained from the King of Spain was one declaring all the Indians to be free.[220]If more examples of the hatred that their attitude on slavery called forth were wanting, it is to be remembered that in 1640, when Montoya and Taño returned from Spain, and affixed the edict of the Pope on the church doors in Piritinanga, threatening with excommunication all slave-holders, a cry of robbery went forth, and the Jesuits were banished from the town. But in this matter of slavery there is no saying what view any one given man will take upon it when he finds himself in such a country as America was during the time the Jesuits were in Paraguay. Don Felix de Azara, a liberal and a philosopher, a man of science, and who has left us perhaps the best description both of Paraguay and of the River Plate, written in the eighteenth century, yet was a partisan of slavery.[221]In a most curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:[222]‘The Court ordered Don Francisco, Judge of the High Court of Charcas, to go to Peru in the character of visitor. The first measure which he took, in 1612, was to order that in future no one should go to the Indians’ houses with the pretext of reducing them (i.e., to civilization), and that noencomiendas(fiefs) should be given of the kind we have explained—that is to say, with personal service (of the Indians). I cannot understand on what he could have founded a measure so politically absurd; but as that judge favoured theideas of the Jesuits, it is suspected that they dictated his conduct.’What stronger testimony (coming from such a man) could possibly be found, both that the Jesuits were opposed to the enslaving of the Indians and that their opposition rendered them unpopular? In the same way, no doubt, some modern, unwise philosopher, writing in Brussels, would uphold the slavery and massacres in Belgian Africa as evidences of a wise policy, because the end condones the means, and in the future, when progress has had time to fructify, there will be workhouses dotted all up and down the Congo, and every ‘native’ will be forced to supply himself, at but a trifle above the cost in Belgium, with a sufficiency of comfortable and thoroughly well-seasoned wooden shoes.So it appears that the aforesaid were the two chief reasons which made the Jesuits unpopular with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay. But in addition it should be remembered that there were in that country members of almost all the other religious Orders, and that, as nearly every one of them had quarrelled with the Jesuits in Europe, or at the best were jealous of their power, the enmities begun in Europe were transmitted to the New World, and constantly fanned by reports of the quarrels which went on between the various Orders all through Europe, and especially in Rome.But if it were the case that the Jesuits excited feelings of hatred in their neighbours, yet they certainly had the gift of attaching to themselves the Indians’ hearts. No institution, condemned with contumely and thrust out of a country where it had worked for long, its supposed crimes kept secret, and its members all condemned unheard, could have preserved its popularity amongst the descendants of the men with whom it worked, after more than one hundred years have passed, had this not been the case.I care not in the least for theories, for this or that dogma of politicians or theologists, but take my stand on what I heard myself during my visits to the now ruined Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Horsemen say horses can go in any shape, and, wonderful as it may seem, men can be happy under conditions which no writer on political economy would recognise as fit for human beings. Not once but many times have aged Indians told me of what their fathers used to say about the Jesuits, and they themselves always spoke of them with respect and kindness, and endeavoured to keep up to the best of their ability all the traditions of the Church ceremonies and hours of prayer which the Jesuits had instilled.That the interior system of their government was perfect, or such as would be suitable for men called ‘civilized’ to-day, is not the case. That it was not only suitable, but perhaps the best that under all the circumstances could have been devised for Indian tribes two hundred years ago, and then but just emerged from semi-nomadism, is, I think, clear, when one remembers in what a state of misery and despair the Indians of theencomiendas[223]and themitaspassed their lives. That semi-communism, with a controlling hand in administrative affairs, produced many superior men, or such as rise to the top in modern times, I do not think; but, then, who are the men, and by the exercise of what kind of virtues do they rise in the societies of modern times? The Jesuits’ aim was to make the great bulk of the Indians under their control contented, and that they gained their end the complaints against them by the surrounding population of slave-holders and hunters after slaves go far to prove.Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting their unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the Jesuits appealed to the Indians; and those two things, by the very nature of their knowledge of mankind, they knew appealed as much to Indians as to any other race of men. Firstly (and in this writers opposed to them, as Brabo[224]and Azara,[225]both agree), they instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own property. And in the second place they told them they were free, and that they had the King of Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their freedom, so that they never could be slaves. Neither of these two propositions commends itself to many writers on the Jesuits in Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves they were sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their neophytes.The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not have seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild rule of the Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed sufficient to the Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them above the Indians of the Spanish settlements, who for the most part passed their lives in slavery.
Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits of the priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to slavery—Their system of administration
Much has been written of the interior government of the missions by the Jesuits, but chiefly by strong partisans, for and against, on either side, whose only object was to make out a case to fit the prejudices of those for whom they wrote. Upon the Jesuit side the Abbé Muratori[204]describes a paradise. A very Carlo Dolce amongst writers, with him all in the missions is so cloying sweet that one’s soul sickens, and one longs in his ‘Happy Christianity’ to find a drop of gall. But for five hundred pages nothing is amiss; the men of Belial persecute the Jesuit saints, who always (after the fashion of their Order and mankind) turn both cheeks to the smiter, and, if their purse is taken, hasten to give up their cloaks. The Indians are all love and gratitude. No need in the Abbé’s pages for the twelve pair of fetters, which Brabo most unkindly has set down amongst his inventories. Never a singlelapsusfrom the moral rule the Jesuits imposed—no drunkenness, and bigamy so seldom met with that it would seem that Joseph Andrews had been a swaggerer judged by the standard of these moral Guaranís. Then comes Ibañez,[205]the ex-Jesuit, on the other side. In a twinkling of an eye the scene is changed. For, quite in Hogarth’s vein, he paints the missions as a perpetual march to Finchley, and tells us that the Indians were savages, and quite unchanged in all their primitive propensities under the Jesuit rule. And for the Jesuits themselves he has a few home-truths administered with vinegar, after the fashion of the renegade the whole world over, who sees nothing good in the society that has turned him out. He roundly says the Jesuits were loafers, accuses them of keeping the Indians ignorant for their own purposes, and paints them quite as black as the Abbé Muratori painted them rose colour, and with as little art. So that, as usually happens in the writings of all polemists, no matter upon which side they may write, but little information, and that distorted to an incredible degree, is all that they afford.
In general, curious as it may appear, the bitterest opponents of the Jesuits were Catholics, and Protestants have often written as apologists. Buffon, Raynal, and Montesquieu, with Voltaire, Robertson, and Southey, have written favourably of the internal government of the missions and the effect which it produced. No other names of equal authority can be quoted on the other side; but yet the fact remains that the Jesuits in Paraguay were exposed to constant calumny from the first day they went there till the last member of the Order left the land.
It is my object first to try to show what the conditions of their government really were, and then to try and clear up what was the cause of unpopularity, and why so many and such persistent calumnies were laid to their account. Stretching right up and down the banks of both the Paraná and Uruguay, the missions extended from Nuestra Senora de Fé[206](or Santa Maria), in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul; and from the mission of Corpus, on the east bank of the Paraná, to Yapeyú, upon the Uruguay. The official capital was placed at Candelaria, on the east bank of the Paraná. In that town the Superior of the missions had his official residence, and from thence he ruled the whole territory, having not only the ecclesiastical but the temporal power, the latter, from the position in which he was placed, so many hundred miles from any Spanish Governor, having by degrees gradually come into his hands. The little town of La Candelaria was, when I knew it, in a most neglected state. The buildings of the Jesuits, with the exception of the church, were all in ruins. The streets were sandy and deserted, the foot-walk separated from them by a line of hard-wood posts, which, as tradition said, were left there by the Jesuits; but the hard woods of Paraguay are almost as imperishable as iron.
Abalsa—that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable—plied fitfully across the Paraná to Ytapua, also a little ex-Jesuit town upon the other side. Each shop had a sign outside, as was the case in England a hundred years ago. Indians supplied the place with vegetables, floating down in canoes piled up with fruit, with flowers, with sweet potatoes, and returning home empty, or for their cargo three or four tin pails, a looking-glass, or other of the marvels which Europe sends as a sample of her manufactures to little frontier towns. All was as quiet, or perhaps much quieter than in the time when the Superior of the Jesuits was in residence, and if it had been necessary, during the hot hours of noon, Godivas by the dozen might have ridden down the streets, had they been able to find horses quiet enough to ride, certain that no one in the town would lose his after-breakfast nap to look at them.
In every mission two chosen Jesuits lived. The elder, selected for his experience of the country and knowledge of the tongue from amongst those who had been rectors of colleges or provincials of the Order, was vested with the civil power, and was responsible direct to the Superior. The second, generally styled companion (el Compañero), acted as his lieutenant, and had full charge of all things spiritual; so that they were a check on one another, and their duties did not clash.
In difficulties the Superior transmitted orders, like a general in the field, by mounted messengers, who frequently rode over a hundred miles a day, relays of horses always being kept ready for emergencies every three leagues upon the road.
From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the territory, most of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks which were the only thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to Corrientes, to Asuncion, others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay were about eighty posts, all guarded, and with horses ready to equip the messengers. But there were also roads in the district of the Upper Paraná, which I myself remember as a wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers roamed about and Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of a blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In the districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in which they carriedyerba[207]and the other products of the land. Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads branching out on every side, and their relays of post-horses at intervals, most probably no State of America at the time had such interior means of communication with the seat of government. The Incas and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried messages and brought up fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the Spanish colonies contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had fallen into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas used in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks to send a letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.
The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance democratic—that is to say, there were officials, as mayors[208]and councillors; but most of them were named by the Jesuits, and all of them, even although elected, owed their election entirely to their priests. This sort of thought-suggested representation was the most fitting for the Indians at the time,[209]and those who look into the workings of a County Council of to-day cannot but think at times that the majority of the councillors would have been better chosen had the electorate had the benefit of some controlling hand, though from what quarter it is difficult to see. The problem which most writers on the Jesuits have quite misunderstood, is how two Jesuits were able to keep a mission of several thousand Indians in order, and to rule supreme without armed forces, or any means of making their power felt or of enforcing obedience to their decrees. Undoubtedly, the dangerous position in which the Indians stood, exposed on one side to the Paulistas, and on the other to the Spanish settlers, both of whom wished to take them as their slaves, placed power in the Jesuits’ hands: for the Indians clearly perceived that the Jesuits alone stood between them and instant slavery. Most controversialists who have opposed the Jesuits assert that the Indians of the missions were, in reality, half slaves. Nothing is further from the truth, if one consults the contemporary records, and remembers the small number of the Jesuits. The work the Indians did was inconsiderable, and under such conditions as to deprive it of much of the toilsomeness which is incident to any kind of work. The very essence of a slave’s estate is being obliged to work without remuneration for another man. Nothing was farther from the Indians than such a state of things. Their work was done for the community, and though the Jesuits, without doubt, had the full disposition of all the money earned in commerce,[210]and of the distribution of the goods, neither the money nor the goods were used for self-aggrandisement, but were laid out for the benefit of the community at large. The total population of the thirty towns is variously estimated from one hundred and forty to one hundred and eighty thousand,[211]and, curiously enough, it remained almost at the same figure during the whole period of the Jesuit rule. This fact has been adduced against the Jesuits, and it has been said that they could not have been good rulers, or the population must have increased; but those who say so forget that the Indians of Paraguay were never in great numbers, and that most writers on the wild tribes, as Dobrizhoffer[212]and Azara, remark their tendency never to increase.
All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been seen, by a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing of any European force, and being almost always on bad terms with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made against the enslaving of the Indians, had no means of coercion at their command. Hence the Indians must have been contented with their rule, for if they had not been so the Jesuits possessed no power to stop them from returning to their savage life. Azara,[213]although in the main an opponent of the Jesuits, in the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of to-day would oppose anything of a Socialistic tendency, yet has this most significant passage in their favour. After enumerating the amount of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he says ‘en faisant le bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque excédant, il était en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’[214]Seldom enough does such a result take place when the balance is struck to-day in any country between the rulers and their ‘taxables’. Following their system of perfect isolation from the world to its logical sequence, the Jesuits surrounded all the territories of their different towns with walls and ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent egress or ingress between the missions and the outer world.[215]Much capital has been made out of this, as it is attempted to be shown that the Indians were thereby treated as prisoners in their own territories. Nothing, however, has been said of the fact that, if the ditches, palisades, and guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the effect of keeping the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as without reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used but as a stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in police-courts, when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises his eyes to heaven, and then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his thumb.
It will be seen that the communism of the missions was of a limited character, and, though the land was cultivated by the labour of the community, that the products were administered by the Jesuits alone. Though it has been stated by many polemical writers, such as Ibañez and Azara, and more recently by Washburne, who was American Minister in Paraguay during the war with Brazil and the Argentine Republic (1866-70), that the Jesuits had amassed great wealth in Paraguay, no proof has ever been advanced for such a charge. Certainly Cardenas made the same statement, but it was never in his power to bring any confirmation of what he said. This power alone was in the hands of Bucareli (1767), the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the expulsion of the Jesuits was carried out. By several extracts from Brabo’s inventories, and by the statement of the receivers sent by Bucareli, I hope to show that there was no great wealth at any time in the mission territory, and that the income was expended in the territory itself. It may be that the expenditure on churches was excessive, and also that the money laid out on religious ceremonies was not productive; but the Jesuits, strange as it may appear, did not conduct the missions after the fashion of a business concern, but rather as the rulers of some Utopia—those foolish beings who think happiness is preferable to wealth.
Nothing can give a better idea of the way of life of a Jesuit priest and of his daily labours than the curious letter of Nicolas Ñeenguiru, originally written in Guaraní, but of which a translation is extant in the National Spanish Archives in Simancas:[216]
‘The manner of living of the father is to shut all the doors, and remain alone with his servant and his cook (who are Indians of a considerable age), and these only wait on him; but by day only, and at twelve o’clock, they go out, and an old man has care of the porter’s lodge, and it is he who shuts the gate when the father is asleep, or when he goes out to see his cultivated ground, and even then they go alone, except it be with an old Indian, who guides them and attends to the (father’s) horse; and after that he goes to Mass, and in the evening to the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, calling us together by the sound of the bell, and before that he calls the boys and girls with a small bell, and after that the good father begins to teach them doctrine and how to cross themselves. In the same way, on every feast day, he preaches to us the Word of God, in the same way the Holy Sacrament of Penitence and of the Communion; in these things does the good Father employ himself, and every night the porter’s lodge is closed, and the key taken to the Father’s room, which is only opened in the morning in order that the sacristan and the cooks may enter. . . .
‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to their rooms, and then they take some hot water andyerba(maté), and nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and then all those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he goes out to see if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and afterwards they go to their room to read the divine service for the day in his book, and to pray that God may prosper him in all his affairs. At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little, not to eat much, for he only has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not filling a little glass; and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in our town, except that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which the Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . . . After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the church; afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is resting those who work in the father’s house go out, and those who do any kind of indoor work, and also the sacristan and the cook: all these go out, and as long as the bell does not ring the doors are shut, and only an old man guards the gate, and when they ring the bell again he opens the doors so that those who work indoors may go inside, and the father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening they ring the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in to teach them Christian doctrine.’
Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in Guaraní, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting and simple as that I have transcribed.
Dobrizhoffer, in his history of the Abipones, says of him that he was a simple Indian, whom often he had seen put in the stocks for petty faults; at any rate, he seems to have been one of those Indians whom the Jesuits had at least favourably impressed by the system they employed. After the manner in which he wrote, hundreds of Indians must have thought, or else the missions, placed as they were, surrounded on all sides by enemies, could not have endured a single day. What was it, then, which raised the Jesuits up so many and so powerful enemies in Paraguay, when in the districts of the Moxos[217]and the Chiquitos where their power was to the full as great, amongst the Indians, they never had a quarrel with the Spaniards till the day they were expelled? Many and various causes contributed to all they underwent, but most undoubtedly two reasons must have brought about their fall.
Since the time of Cardenas, the report that the Jesuits had rich mines, which they worked on the sly, had been persistently on the increase. Although disproved a thousand times, it still remained; even to-day, in spite of ‘science’ and its wonderful discoveries, there are many in Paraguay who cherish dreams of discovering Jesuit mines. Humanity loves to deceive itself, although there are plenty ready to deceive it; and if men can both forge for themselves fables and at the same time damage their neighbours in so doing, their pleasure is intense. I take it that many really believed the stories of the mines, being unable to credit that anyone would live far from the world, surrounded but by Indians, for any other reason than to be rich. But let a country have rich minerals, even if they exist but in imagination, and it becomes a crime against humanity to shut it up. So that it would appear one of the reasons which induced hatred against the Jesuits was the idea that they had enormous mineral wealth, which either they did not work or else worked in secret for the benefit of their society.
The other reason was the question of slavery. Once get it well into your head that you and yours are ‘reasoning men’[218](gente de razon), and that all coloured people are irrational, and slavery follows as a natural sequence; for ‘reasoning men’ have wit to make a gun, and on the gun all reason takes it stand. From the first instant of their arrival in America, the Jesuits had maintained a firm front against the enslavement of the Indians. They may have had their faults in Europe, and in the larger centres of population in America; but where they came in contact with the Indians, theirs was the sole voice raised upon their side.
In 1593 Padre Juan Romero, sent from Peru as Superior to Paraguay, on his arrival gave up an estate (with Indians inencomienda) which his predecessors had enjoyed, alleging that he did not wish to give the example of making profit out of the unpaid labour of the Indians,[219]and that without their work the estate was valueless.
On many occasions, notably in the time of Cardenas, the Jesuits openly withstood all slavery, and amongst the concessions that Ruiz Montoya obtained from the King of Spain was one declaring all the Indians to be free.[220]If more examples of the hatred that their attitude on slavery called forth were wanting, it is to be remembered that in 1640, when Montoya and Taño returned from Spain, and affixed the edict of the Pope on the church doors in Piritinanga, threatening with excommunication all slave-holders, a cry of robbery went forth, and the Jesuits were banished from the town. But in this matter of slavery there is no saying what view any one given man will take upon it when he finds himself in such a country as America was during the time the Jesuits were in Paraguay. Don Felix de Azara, a liberal and a philosopher, a man of science, and who has left us perhaps the best description both of Paraguay and of the River Plate, written in the eighteenth century, yet was a partisan of slavery.[221]In a most curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:[222]‘The Court ordered Don Francisco, Judge of the High Court of Charcas, to go to Peru in the character of visitor. The first measure which he took, in 1612, was to order that in future no one should go to the Indians’ houses with the pretext of reducing them (i.e., to civilization), and that noencomiendas(fiefs) should be given of the kind we have explained—that is to say, with personal service (of the Indians). I cannot understand on what he could have founded a measure so politically absurd; but as that judge favoured theideas of the Jesuits, it is suspected that they dictated his conduct.’
What stronger testimony (coming from such a man) could possibly be found, both that the Jesuits were opposed to the enslaving of the Indians and that their opposition rendered them unpopular? In the same way, no doubt, some modern, unwise philosopher, writing in Brussels, would uphold the slavery and massacres in Belgian Africa as evidences of a wise policy, because the end condones the means, and in the future, when progress has had time to fructify, there will be workhouses dotted all up and down the Congo, and every ‘native’ will be forced to supply himself, at but a trifle above the cost in Belgium, with a sufficiency of comfortable and thoroughly well-seasoned wooden shoes.
So it appears that the aforesaid were the two chief reasons which made the Jesuits unpopular with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay. But in addition it should be remembered that there were in that country members of almost all the other religious Orders, and that, as nearly every one of them had quarrelled with the Jesuits in Europe, or at the best were jealous of their power, the enmities begun in Europe were transmitted to the New World, and constantly fanned by reports of the quarrels which went on between the various Orders all through Europe, and especially in Rome.
But if it were the case that the Jesuits excited feelings of hatred in their neighbours, yet they certainly had the gift of attaching to themselves the Indians’ hearts. No institution, condemned with contumely and thrust out of a country where it had worked for long, its supposed crimes kept secret, and its members all condemned unheard, could have preserved its popularity amongst the descendants of the men with whom it worked, after more than one hundred years have passed, had this not been the case.
I care not in the least for theories, for this or that dogma of politicians or theologists, but take my stand on what I heard myself during my visits to the now ruined Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Horsemen say horses can go in any shape, and, wonderful as it may seem, men can be happy under conditions which no writer on political economy would recognise as fit for human beings. Not once but many times have aged Indians told me of what their fathers used to say about the Jesuits, and they themselves always spoke of them with respect and kindness, and endeavoured to keep up to the best of their ability all the traditions of the Church ceremonies and hours of prayer which the Jesuits had instilled.
That the interior system of their government was perfect, or such as would be suitable for men called ‘civilized’ to-day, is not the case. That it was not only suitable, but perhaps the best that under all the circumstances could have been devised for Indian tribes two hundred years ago, and then but just emerged from semi-nomadism, is, I think, clear, when one remembers in what a state of misery and despair the Indians of theencomiendas[223]and themitaspassed their lives. That semi-communism, with a controlling hand in administrative affairs, produced many superior men, or such as rise to the top in modern times, I do not think; but, then, who are the men, and by the exercise of what kind of virtues do they rise in the societies of modern times? The Jesuits’ aim was to make the great bulk of the Indians under their control contented, and that they gained their end the complaints against them by the surrounding population of slave-holders and hunters after slaves go far to prove.
Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting their unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the Jesuits appealed to the Indians; and those two things, by the very nature of their knowledge of mankind, they knew appealed as much to Indians as to any other race of men. Firstly (and in this writers opposed to them, as Brabo[224]and Azara,[225]both agree), they instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own property. And in the second place they told them they were free, and that they had the King of Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their freedom, so that they never could be slaves. Neither of these two propositions commends itself to many writers on the Jesuits in Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves they were sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their neophytes.
The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not have seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild rule of the Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed sufficient to the Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them above the Indians of the Spanish settlements, who for the most part passed their lives in slavery.