Chapter XIConclusionIt is the fashion of some to say that history, of whatever nature, can but be written dispassionately at a period sufficiently removed from the events of which it treats to have allowed the heat of passion to evaporate. This is as false as almost every other dictum which men take on trust, forgetting that to have passed into the proverbial stage a saying must have been foolish at the start, in order that it should have got itself commended by the majority of mankind.The heat of passion never evaporates in regard to events which at the epoch of their acting caused great controversies. From writings of contemporaries the coolest-headed take a bias, in the same way that men unconsciously pass on the microbes of disease to their best friends. Only from inventories and rolls of court, State Papers and the like is it possible to get unbiassed matter, and even then figures, those chief deceivers of mankind, can be well cooked for or against, according to the bias of the man who draws them up. Still, when they are drawn up by enemies, they often quite unwittingly show out the truth. In a letter dated October 30, 1768, Bucareli sends a list to Aranda of the effects of many of the Jesuits taken from Paraguay and sent by him to Spain. The list itself speaks volumes in defence of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Whatever may have been their faults, the Governor himself (or even Charles III.) could not have charged upon the captured priests that they had got together a large stock of property during their mission life.[341]The first upon the list, P. Pedro Zabaleta, took ten shirts, two pillow-cases, two sheets, three pocket-handkerchiefs, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of socks, and a pound and a half of snuff. The others were in general less well set up with shirts,[342]some few had cloaks, and one (P. Sigismundo Griera) a nightcap; but all of them had their snuff, the only relic of their luxurious mission life. Manuel Vergara, their Provincial, testifies in a paper sent with the list that most of the clothes were taken from the common stock, and all the snuff. What sort of treatment they endured upon their passage in the two frigatesSan FernandoandSan Nicolasis quite unknown, but certainly their luggage could not have been in the way; and for their snuff, no doubt they husbanded it with care during the long two months, which in those days was thought a record run.[343]In the missions which they had so long tended with such care, giving their muddle-headed love to the Indians in their Machiavelian way, all was confusion in the space of six short months. Dean Funes and Don Feliz de Azara[344]are the only two contemporary writers who treat of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay outside the official world. The Dean, a man of the old school, was kindly and humane, well educated, and, having been brought up in Tucuman amongst an Indian population, looked on the Indians in a kindly way as fellow-creatures, though differing in essential points from races which had been for centuries exposed to civilization and its effects. His description of the Indians has for veracity and observation not often been surpassed. ‘Those natives[345](he says) are of a pale colour, well made, and well set up. Their talent and capacity are capable of much advancement. Though they lack invention in themselves, yet are they excellent in imitation. Idleness seems natural to them, although it may be more the effect of habit than of temperament; their inclination towards acquiring knowledge is decided, and novelty has its full effect upon their minds. Ambitious of command, they acquit themselves with honour in the positions to which they may attain. Eloquence is held amongst them in the first place, and avarice in no respect degrades their minds. An injurious word offends them more than punishments, which they solicit rather than undergo the former outrage. Incontinency in their women they look upon but with indifference, and even husbands are little sensible to acts of infidelity. Conjugal love has but slight influence upon the treatment which they give their wives. Fathers of families care for their sons but little. The serenity of mind of all these Indians in the midst of the greatest troubles is without equal in the world; never a sigh with them takes off the bitterness of suffering.’No one who knows the Indians but must confess that Dean Funes had made a study of their character deeper than is his own. Azara, on the other hand, was a man of science; his books upon the birds and quadrupeds of Paraguay still hold the field, and are esteemed for curious and minute observation and accuracy as to scientific facts. The man himself was an extremely able writer, a captain in the Spanish navy, and well educated. For twenty years he served in Paraguay and in the River Plate, with credit to himself and profit to the country which he served. Educated as he was in the school of the Encyclopædists, amongst the strictest of the pharisees of Liberalism, to him the very name of Jesuit was anathema. After the fashion of his kind, he seemed unable to distinguish between the scheming Jesuits at European courts and the simple and hard-working missionaries in Paraguay. All were anathema, and therefore all their system was repugnant to him; and though a kindly man, as is set forth abundantly in all his works, he never paused to think that there could be a difference between his ideal free Liberal citizen, voting and exercising all his right of citizenship in a free commonwealth, after the fashion of a dormouse freely exercising his natural functions in the receiver of an air-pump, and a simple Indian of the Paraguayan woods.Freedom to him, as it has been to many theorists, was an abstract thing, possessing which a man, even though starving, must in its mere possession find true happiness. He never paused to inquire, as even Bucareli did, if the mission Indians could hold their own under free competition with the ‘sagacity’ of the surrounding Spanish settlers. Therefore he is the authority whom Liberals always quote against the system of the Jesuits. When he inveighs against their semi-communism, the modern Liberal claps his hands, and sees a kindred Daniel come to judgment, as he would do to-day if in Damaraland the Germans set up a Socialistic settlement amongst the negro tribes, and some Liberal economist denounced it with an oath. Azara quite forgets that, as Dean Funes says, the ‘sentiment of property was very weak amongst the Indians,’ and that their minds were ‘not degraded by the vice of avarice.’ Still, Azara was an honest man—a keen observer and impartial, as far as his upbringing and the tenets he had imbibed in youth permitted him to be. Upon the question of the Jesuits he was entirely prejudiced, although few have stood up more stoutly to condemn the faulty system which the Spaniards pursued towards the Indians in both Americas. But on account of his political proclivities Azara is quite silent as to the state into which the missions fell after the Jesuits had been expelled. No doubt he thought that, once their faulty system was removed, the Indians would soon become what he judged civilized, and hold their own with those around them, though of another race and blood.Funes, upon the contrary, fully exposes all the rapacity and incompetence of the new shepherds left by Bucareli to guard the Jesuits’ sheep.‘Ignorant[346]of Guaraní, and without patience to acquire it, confusion reigned in the missions as in a tower of Babel,’ and he goes on to say ‘an imperious tone of order was substituted for the paternal manner (of the Jesuits), and as a deaf man who cannot hear has to be taught by blows, that was the teaching they (the Indians) had to bear.’ Shortly, he says, ‘a wall of hatred and contempt began to rise between the Indians and their masters; and the priests, who by the virtue of their office ought to have been the ministers of peace, being without influence to command . . . and not entirely irreproachable in their ministry . . . added themselves to the discord and dissension which arose.’Bucareli, as soon as he knew what was going on, advised that all the priests appointed by himself should be replaced by others. This accordingly was done, but it was even then too late: the missions went from bad to worse; of the vast quantities of cattle few were left; the priests followed the example of their prototypes Hofni and Phineas, went about armed, took Indian mistresses, and neglected all religious duties, treating the Indians after the fashion of the Spaniards in the settlements. Thus the Arcadian life, which had subsisted more than two hundred years, in the brief space of two short years was lost.The vast estancias, in which at the expulsion more than a million head of cattle pastured,[347]were but bare plains, in which the cattle that were left had all run wild or perished from neglect. Wild beasts roamed round the outskirts of the half-deserted towns. A dense low scrub of yatais and of palmettos invaded all the pasture-lands, and in the erstwhile cultivated fields rank weeds sprang up, and choked the crops which in the Jesuits’ times had made the mission territories the most productive of the American possessions of the Spanish crown. The churches were unserved, and in the evening air no more the hymns resounded, nor did the long white-robed processions headed by a cross pass to the fields to peaceful labour, marshalled by their priests. The fruit-trees round the missions were either all cut down for firewood or had degenerated, and the plantations of the Ilex Paraguayensis,[348]from which they made theiryerba, which had been brought from the up-country forests with vast pains, were in decay, and quite uncultivated.The Indian population had almost disappeared within the space of eight-and-twenty years.[349]The Guaranís collected from the woods with so much effort to the missionary, then guided down the Paraná by the most noble and self-sacrificing of their priests, Ruiz Montoya, and after that redeemed with blood from the fierce Mameluco bands, had shrunk away before the baneful breath of unaccustomed contact with the civilizing whites.The simple ceremonious, if perhaps futile, mission-life had withered up at the first touch of vivifying competition—that competition which has made the whole world gray, reducing everything and everyone to the most base and commonest denominator.The self-created goddess Progress was justified by works, and all the land left barren, waiting the time when factories shall pollute its sky, and render miserable the European emigrants, who, flying from their slavery at home, shall have found it waiting for them in their new paradise beyond the seas.The world, it would appear, is a vast class-room, and its Creator but a professor of political economy, apparently unable to carry out his theories with effect. Therefore, to us, the Western Europeans, he has turned for help, and upon us devolved the task of extirpating all those peoples upon whom he tried his ’prentice hand. On us he laid injunctions to increase at home, and to the happier portions of the world to carry death under the guise of life unsuitable to those into whose lands we spread.Let those made cruel by the want of sympathy with men that the mere poring over books so often superinduces in the mind protest when judging of the Jesuits in Paraguay against the outrage done to their theories by the scheme the Jesuits pursued.It has been nobly said[350]‘that the extinction of the smallest animal is a far greater loss than if the works of all the Greeks had perished.’ How much the greater loss that of a type of man such as the Indians, whom the semi-communistic Jesuit government successfully preserved, sheltering them from the death-dealing breath of our cold northern life and its full, fell effects!There are those, no doubt, who think that a tree brought from the tropics should be planted out at home, to take its chance of life in the keen winter of the north, in holy competition with the ash and oak; and if it dies, there are still pines enough, with stores of dogwood, thickets of elder, and a wilderness of junipers. They may be right; but, after all, that which has felt the tropic sun is for the tropics, and to grow under the tantalizing sunshine of the north, which lights but does not warm, it must have glass, and shelter from the cold.But of aforethought to deliberately transplant our fogs and chilling atmosphere, and so to nip and kill plants which crave only the sun to live, that is a crime against humanity; a crime posterity with execration will one day taunt us with, and hold us up to execration, as we to-day in our hypocrisy piously curse the memories of Pizarro and Cortés.In the eternal warfare between those who think that progress—which to them means tramways and electric light—is preferable to a quiet life of futile happiness of mind there is scant truce, so that my readers have to take their choice whether to side with Funes or Azara in judging of the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. There is no middle course between the old and new; no halting-place; no chink in which imagination can drive in its nail to stop the wheels of time; therefore, no doubt, the Jesuit commonwealth was doomed to disappear. But for myself, I am glad that five-and-twenty years ago I saw the Indians who still lingered about the ruined mission towns, mumbling their maiméd rites when the Angelus at eventide awoke the echoes of the encroaching woods, whilst screeching crowds of parrots and macaws hovered around the date-palms which in the plaza reared their slender heads, silent memorials of the departed Jesuits’ rule.Indians and Jesuits are gone from Paraguay, the Indians to that Trapalanda which is their appointed place; and for the Jesuits, they are forgotten, except by those who dive into old chronicles, or who write books, proposing something and concluding nothing, or by travellers, who, wandering in the Tarumensian woods, come on a clump of orange-trees run wild amongst the urundéys.FINIS NON CORONAT OPUSIllustration:
Conclusion
It is the fashion of some to say that history, of whatever nature, can but be written dispassionately at a period sufficiently removed from the events of which it treats to have allowed the heat of passion to evaporate. This is as false as almost every other dictum which men take on trust, forgetting that to have passed into the proverbial stage a saying must have been foolish at the start, in order that it should have got itself commended by the majority of mankind.
The heat of passion never evaporates in regard to events which at the epoch of their acting caused great controversies. From writings of contemporaries the coolest-headed take a bias, in the same way that men unconsciously pass on the microbes of disease to their best friends. Only from inventories and rolls of court, State Papers and the like is it possible to get unbiassed matter, and even then figures, those chief deceivers of mankind, can be well cooked for or against, according to the bias of the man who draws them up. Still, when they are drawn up by enemies, they often quite unwittingly show out the truth. In a letter dated October 30, 1768, Bucareli sends a list to Aranda of the effects of many of the Jesuits taken from Paraguay and sent by him to Spain. The list itself speaks volumes in defence of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Whatever may have been their faults, the Governor himself (or even Charles III.) could not have charged upon the captured priests that they had got together a large stock of property during their mission life.[341]The first upon the list, P. Pedro Zabaleta, took ten shirts, two pillow-cases, two sheets, three pocket-handkerchiefs, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of socks, and a pound and a half of snuff. The others were in general less well set up with shirts,[342]some few had cloaks, and one (P. Sigismundo Griera) a nightcap; but all of them had their snuff, the only relic of their luxurious mission life. Manuel Vergara, their Provincial, testifies in a paper sent with the list that most of the clothes were taken from the common stock, and all the snuff. What sort of treatment they endured upon their passage in the two frigatesSan FernandoandSan Nicolasis quite unknown, but certainly their luggage could not have been in the way; and for their snuff, no doubt they husbanded it with care during the long two months, which in those days was thought a record run.[343]In the missions which they had so long tended with such care, giving their muddle-headed love to the Indians in their Machiavelian way, all was confusion in the space of six short months. Dean Funes and Don Feliz de Azara[344]are the only two contemporary writers who treat of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay outside the official world. The Dean, a man of the old school, was kindly and humane, well educated, and, having been brought up in Tucuman amongst an Indian population, looked on the Indians in a kindly way as fellow-creatures, though differing in essential points from races which had been for centuries exposed to civilization and its effects. His description of the Indians has for veracity and observation not often been surpassed. ‘Those natives[345](he says) are of a pale colour, well made, and well set up. Their talent and capacity are capable of much advancement. Though they lack invention in themselves, yet are they excellent in imitation. Idleness seems natural to them, although it may be more the effect of habit than of temperament; their inclination towards acquiring knowledge is decided, and novelty has its full effect upon their minds. Ambitious of command, they acquit themselves with honour in the positions to which they may attain. Eloquence is held amongst them in the first place, and avarice in no respect degrades their minds. An injurious word offends them more than punishments, which they solicit rather than undergo the former outrage. Incontinency in their women they look upon but with indifference, and even husbands are little sensible to acts of infidelity. Conjugal love has but slight influence upon the treatment which they give their wives. Fathers of families care for their sons but little. The serenity of mind of all these Indians in the midst of the greatest troubles is without equal in the world; never a sigh with them takes off the bitterness of suffering.’
No one who knows the Indians but must confess that Dean Funes had made a study of their character deeper than is his own. Azara, on the other hand, was a man of science; his books upon the birds and quadrupeds of Paraguay still hold the field, and are esteemed for curious and minute observation and accuracy as to scientific facts. The man himself was an extremely able writer, a captain in the Spanish navy, and well educated. For twenty years he served in Paraguay and in the River Plate, with credit to himself and profit to the country which he served. Educated as he was in the school of the Encyclopædists, amongst the strictest of the pharisees of Liberalism, to him the very name of Jesuit was anathema. After the fashion of his kind, he seemed unable to distinguish between the scheming Jesuits at European courts and the simple and hard-working missionaries in Paraguay. All were anathema, and therefore all their system was repugnant to him; and though a kindly man, as is set forth abundantly in all his works, he never paused to think that there could be a difference between his ideal free Liberal citizen, voting and exercising all his right of citizenship in a free commonwealth, after the fashion of a dormouse freely exercising his natural functions in the receiver of an air-pump, and a simple Indian of the Paraguayan woods.
Freedom to him, as it has been to many theorists, was an abstract thing, possessing which a man, even though starving, must in its mere possession find true happiness. He never paused to inquire, as even Bucareli did, if the mission Indians could hold their own under free competition with the ‘sagacity’ of the surrounding Spanish settlers. Therefore he is the authority whom Liberals always quote against the system of the Jesuits. When he inveighs against their semi-communism, the modern Liberal claps his hands, and sees a kindred Daniel come to judgment, as he would do to-day if in Damaraland the Germans set up a Socialistic settlement amongst the negro tribes, and some Liberal economist denounced it with an oath. Azara quite forgets that, as Dean Funes says, the ‘sentiment of property was very weak amongst the Indians,’ and that their minds were ‘not degraded by the vice of avarice.’ Still, Azara was an honest man—a keen observer and impartial, as far as his upbringing and the tenets he had imbibed in youth permitted him to be. Upon the question of the Jesuits he was entirely prejudiced, although few have stood up more stoutly to condemn the faulty system which the Spaniards pursued towards the Indians in both Americas. But on account of his political proclivities Azara is quite silent as to the state into which the missions fell after the Jesuits had been expelled. No doubt he thought that, once their faulty system was removed, the Indians would soon become what he judged civilized, and hold their own with those around them, though of another race and blood.
Funes, upon the contrary, fully exposes all the rapacity and incompetence of the new shepherds left by Bucareli to guard the Jesuits’ sheep.
‘Ignorant[346]of Guaraní, and without patience to acquire it, confusion reigned in the missions as in a tower of Babel,’ and he goes on to say ‘an imperious tone of order was substituted for the paternal manner (of the Jesuits), and as a deaf man who cannot hear has to be taught by blows, that was the teaching they (the Indians) had to bear.’ Shortly, he says, ‘a wall of hatred and contempt began to rise between the Indians and their masters; and the priests, who by the virtue of their office ought to have been the ministers of peace, being without influence to command . . . and not entirely irreproachable in their ministry . . . added themselves to the discord and dissension which arose.’
Bucareli, as soon as he knew what was going on, advised that all the priests appointed by himself should be replaced by others. This accordingly was done, but it was even then too late: the missions went from bad to worse; of the vast quantities of cattle few were left; the priests followed the example of their prototypes Hofni and Phineas, went about armed, took Indian mistresses, and neglected all religious duties, treating the Indians after the fashion of the Spaniards in the settlements. Thus the Arcadian life, which had subsisted more than two hundred years, in the brief space of two short years was lost.
The vast estancias, in which at the expulsion more than a million head of cattle pastured,[347]were but bare plains, in which the cattle that were left had all run wild or perished from neglect. Wild beasts roamed round the outskirts of the half-deserted towns. A dense low scrub of yatais and of palmettos invaded all the pasture-lands, and in the erstwhile cultivated fields rank weeds sprang up, and choked the crops which in the Jesuits’ times had made the mission territories the most productive of the American possessions of the Spanish crown. The churches were unserved, and in the evening air no more the hymns resounded, nor did the long white-robed processions headed by a cross pass to the fields to peaceful labour, marshalled by their priests. The fruit-trees round the missions were either all cut down for firewood or had degenerated, and the plantations of the Ilex Paraguayensis,[348]from which they made theiryerba, which had been brought from the up-country forests with vast pains, were in decay, and quite uncultivated.
The Indian population had almost disappeared within the space of eight-and-twenty years.[349]The Guaranís collected from the woods with so much effort to the missionary, then guided down the Paraná by the most noble and self-sacrificing of their priests, Ruiz Montoya, and after that redeemed with blood from the fierce Mameluco bands, had shrunk away before the baneful breath of unaccustomed contact with the civilizing whites.
The simple ceremonious, if perhaps futile, mission-life had withered up at the first touch of vivifying competition—that competition which has made the whole world gray, reducing everything and everyone to the most base and commonest denominator.
The self-created goddess Progress was justified by works, and all the land left barren, waiting the time when factories shall pollute its sky, and render miserable the European emigrants, who, flying from their slavery at home, shall have found it waiting for them in their new paradise beyond the seas.
The world, it would appear, is a vast class-room, and its Creator but a professor of political economy, apparently unable to carry out his theories with effect. Therefore, to us, the Western Europeans, he has turned for help, and upon us devolved the task of extirpating all those peoples upon whom he tried his ’prentice hand. On us he laid injunctions to increase at home, and to the happier portions of the world to carry death under the guise of life unsuitable to those into whose lands we spread.
Let those made cruel by the want of sympathy with men that the mere poring over books so often superinduces in the mind protest when judging of the Jesuits in Paraguay against the outrage done to their theories by the scheme the Jesuits pursued.
It has been nobly said[350]‘that the extinction of the smallest animal is a far greater loss than if the works of all the Greeks had perished.’ How much the greater loss that of a type of man such as the Indians, whom the semi-communistic Jesuit government successfully preserved, sheltering them from the death-dealing breath of our cold northern life and its full, fell effects!
There are those, no doubt, who think that a tree brought from the tropics should be planted out at home, to take its chance of life in the keen winter of the north, in holy competition with the ash and oak; and if it dies, there are still pines enough, with stores of dogwood, thickets of elder, and a wilderness of junipers. They may be right; but, after all, that which has felt the tropic sun is for the tropics, and to grow under the tantalizing sunshine of the north, which lights but does not warm, it must have glass, and shelter from the cold.
But of aforethought to deliberately transplant our fogs and chilling atmosphere, and so to nip and kill plants which crave only the sun to live, that is a crime against humanity; a crime posterity with execration will one day taunt us with, and hold us up to execration, as we to-day in our hypocrisy piously curse the memories of Pizarro and Cortés.
In the eternal warfare between those who think that progress—which to them means tramways and electric light—is preferable to a quiet life of futile happiness of mind there is scant truce, so that my readers have to take their choice whether to side with Funes or Azara in judging of the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. There is no middle course between the old and new; no halting-place; no chink in which imagination can drive in its nail to stop the wheels of time; therefore, no doubt, the Jesuit commonwealth was doomed to disappear. But for myself, I am glad that five-and-twenty years ago I saw the Indians who still lingered about the ruined mission towns, mumbling their maiméd rites when the Angelus at eventide awoke the echoes of the encroaching woods, whilst screeching crowds of parrots and macaws hovered around the date-palms which in the plaza reared their slender heads, silent memorials of the departed Jesuits’ rule.
Indians and Jesuits are gone from Paraguay, the Indians to that Trapalanda which is their appointed place; and for the Jesuits, they are forgotten, except by those who dive into old chronicles, or who write books, proposing something and concluding nothing, or by travellers, who, wandering in the Tarumensian woods, come on a clump of orange-trees run wild amongst the urundéys.
FINIS NON CORONAT OPUS
Illustration: