A RIVER ROAD IN ARGENTINA.A RIVER ROAD IN ARGENTINA.[From a lithograph.]
Internal peace has not been menaced during General Roca's term. The commercial situation of the country has vastly improved. Immigration, which had largely ceased after 1890, has again risen to over a hundred thousand a year. Wheat exports rose from 4,000,000 bushels in 1897 to 61,000,000 in 1900. The total exports in 1899 were $185,000,000, twice as great per capita as the record export of the United States. There have been no issues of paper money, and the value of the currency has risen to forty cents. The government has established a new artificial par at a little more than this sum, and has begun accumulating a gold reserve. A resumption of specie payments is soon expected.
Nevertheless the chief difficulties and preoccupations of the Roca administration have been with financial questions. A deficit of $70,000,000 had accumulated in the few years before 1898, and the interest on the immense public debt makes an equilibrium in the budget almost impossible. Many of the provincial governments have defaulted, and the national government has had to carry their burdens in addition to its own, to satisfy clamorous foreign creditors. In 1901 it was proposed to unify the debt, refunding the whole at a lower rate of interest, and specifically pledging certain sources of public income. This plan had the approval of the government, but the national pride was touched by the latter feature. The populace could not bear the idea of giving a sort of mortgage on the country. The passage of the bill by Congress was met with so many demonstrations of popular disapproval that it was abandoned. This change of front was accompanied by the formation of an alliance between the followers of General Mitre and those of General Roca.
The industrial impetus already acquired by the Argentine Republic is sufficient to carry it over all obstacles, and it seems assured that there will be a rapid settlement of the whole of this immense andfertile plain. Here nature has done everything to make communication easy, and a temperate climate insures crops suited to modern European civilisation. Two grave perils have so far been encountered—namely, a tendency toward political disintegration and an abuse of the taxing power. The former is now remote, for since the railways began to concentrate wealth and influence at Buenos Aires, and to destroy the prestige and political power of the provincial capitals, the national structure built by the patriots of 1853 has stood firmer each year.
The Argentine has had a bitter lesson of the evils of governmental extravagance, and still groans under the burden of a debt which seems disproportionately heavy, but the growth of population and wealth will soon overtake it, and the very difficulties of meeting interest are the cause of an economy in administration, of which the good effects will be felt long after the debt itself has been reduced to a reasonable per capita. A nation is in the process of formation in the Plate valley whose material greatness is certain, and whose moral and intellectual characteristics will have the widest influence on the rest of South America.
PARAGUAY
The beginnings of the settlements in Paraguay have been sketched in the introductory chapter on the discoveries and conquest. In 1526, Cabot, searching to find a route to the gold and silver mines of the centre of the continent, penetrated as far as the site of the present city of Asuncion. He had already, in the exploration of the Upper Paraná, skirted the southern and eastern boundary of what has since become the country of Paraguay. Ten years later the exhausted and discouraged remnants of Mendoza's great expedition sought rest and refuge among the peaceful agricultural tribes of this region. Under Domingos Irala, these six hundred surviving Spanish adventurers founded Asuncion in 1536, the first settlement of the valley of the Plate. They reduced the Indians to a mild slavery, compelling them to build houses, perform menial services, and cultivate the soil. The country was divided into great tracts called "encomiendas," which, with the Indians that inhabited them, were distributed among the settlers. Fewwomen had been able to follow Mendoza's expedition, so the Spaniards of Asuncion took wives from among the Indians. Subsequent immigration was small, and the proportion of Spanish blood has always been inconsiderable, compared with the number of aborigines. The children of the marriages between the Spanish conquerors and Indian women were proud of their white descent. The superior strain of blood easily dominated, and the mixed Paraguayan Creoles became Spaniards to all intents and purposes. Spaniards and Creoles, however, learned the Indian language; Guarany rather than Spanish became, and has remained, the most usual method of communication.
The Spaniards of Asuncion were turbulent and disinclined to submit to authority. They paid scant respect to the adelantados, whom the Castilian king sent out one after another as feudal proprietors. Until his death Irala was the most influential man in the colony, but his power rested on his own energy and capacity, and on the fear and respect in which he was held by his companions, more than on the royal commission that finally could not be withheld from him.
ASUNCION.ASUNCION.
Across the river from Asuncion stretched away to the west the vast and swampy plains of the great Chaco. It was inhabited by wandering tribes of Indians whom the Spaniards could not subdue. They fled before the expeditions like scared wild beasts, only to turn and mercilessly massacre every man when a chance was offered for ambush or surprise. To the east of the Paraguay River the country was dry, rolling, and extremely fertile. Though covered with magnificent forests it was easily penetrable all the way across to the Paraná. Its inhabitants were the docile Guaranies, who knew something of agriculture and in whose villages considerable stores of food were to be found. The population was dense for savages, but they had no political or military organisation. Divided into small tribes which did not co-operate, they rendered little respect or obedience to their chiefs. Under these conditions Spanish authority rapidly spread over central and southern Paraguay. Before Irala died, in 1557, the settlers had reached the Paraná on the western boundary and founded settlements nearly as far north as the Grand Cataract.
Shortly afterwards, the Creoles of Asuncion began their expeditions to the South. By 1580 they controlled the Paraná River from its confluence with the Paraguay to the ocean, had established Santa Fé and Buenos Aires on its right bank, and opened up the southern pampa. The pastoral provinces on the Lower Paraná were slowly peopled. A large proportion of the energetic Paraguayan Creoles preferred the semi-nomadic life of the plains to indolence among their Indian slaves in the tropical forests of Paraguay. The two regions were distinct in climate, habits of life, social and industrial organisation. They became separated in interests and soon were to be divided politically. Though, until 1619, the whole province continued to bear the name of Paraguay, the usual residence of the governor was Buenos Aires. Asuncion was often forced to becontent with a lieutenant-governor, and was fast relegated to the position of a neglected and isolated district.
In the days of the Spanish conquest, Franciscan monks were the priests who most often accompanied the expeditions, and they took the most prominent part in the earliest establishment of religion. The members of this Order, however, with a few notable exceptions, took no special interest in the evangelisation of the aborigines. On the contrary, they were as fierce as the soldiers themselves in their cruelties to the poor Indians. The shouts of a Franciscan monk set on Pizarro's ruffians to the slaughter of the Incas that surrounded Atahualpa. Those that came to Paraguay preferred to live in the towns, and their conduct toward the Indians differed little from that of the lay Spaniards. It was the genius of Ignatius Loyola that conceived and perfected a machine able to carry Christianity and civilisation to these remote and inaccessible peoples and regions. Within a few years after its foundation, the Society of Jesus turned its attention to the evangelisation of South America; in 1550 the Jesuit Fathers began their work in Brazil. Their successes and failures in that country had little relation with their work in Spanish South America. It is curious, however, that their most successful early work in Brazil should have been done in São Paulo, on the extreme eastern border of the wide plateau which drains to the west into the Paraná. For a decade or two after 1550, they laboured hard to gather the Indians of that region into villages, to teach themChristianity, and protect them against the tyrannies and exactions of the Portuguese settlers. The contest was unequal; the Jesuits were not long able to prevent the enslavement of their proselytes. The Paulistas destroyed the Jesuit missions in their neighbourhood and became the most expert in Indian warfare and the most terrible foes of the Jesuit system of all the colonists of South America. Their determined opposition was the most potent cause in preventing the subjection of South America to a theocratic system of government.
About 1586 the Jesuit Fathers entered Paraguay for the purpose of beginning the evangelisation of the Indians of the Plate valley. They established a school in Asuncion and pushed out on foot into the remoter districts. Their success was phenomenal. They spared no pains to learn the language of the savages so that they might teach them in their own tongue. They approached them with kindness and benevolence showing in every gesture. They availed themselves of the Indians' love of bright colours and showy processions. They went unarmed and alone, offering useful and attractive presents, conforming to savage customs and prejudices, and imposing on the vivid savage imagination with the pomp of Catholic worship. They taught their savage pupils how to cultivate the ground to get greater results, how to save themselves unnecessary labour, and how to live comfortably. They persuaded them to gather into towns, where they built comfortable houses and tight warehouses, while the men cultivated the soil and the women spun and wove cotton.
The Jesuits came almost immediately into conflict with the interests of the Spanish colonists. They were welcomed at first, because they were expected to lend themselves to the enslavement of the Indians. When their real purposes were discovered feeling against them rose high. The Creoles clearly saw that it was going to be far more difficult to extend their power over the Indians gathered together in villages under Jesuit protection than over unorganised and friendless bands of unconverted savages.
Before 1610 the number of Jesuits that had come to Paraguay was very small. Among the first was the Father named Thomas Fields, a Scotchman. As a matter of fact, the Jesuits were recruited from all the nations of Europe and under their military system had to go wherever they might be sent. English, Irish, and German names, as well as Spanish, are to be found in the lists of Jesuits who laboured in Paraguay.
In 1608 Philip III. of Spain attended to the complaints that came to him through the powerful chiefs of the Order of the indifference and opposition shown by the settlers and colonial authorities, and gave his royal and official sanction to the Jesuit conversion of the Indians along the Upper Paraná. By this time the Fathers had penetrated across to the Paraná and had followed up that stream far north of the Grand Cataract in latitude 24°, which marks the northern boundary of Paraguay proper. It is hard to understand how they overcame the difficulties of travelling. To this day it is well-nighimpossible to reach the Grand Cataract, and years pass without that wonder of nature's being seen by the eyes of civilised man. No part of the world, outside the Arctic regions, is less accessible than the Paraná above the Grand Cataract. Yet these heroic priests made that region the principal theatre of their operations in the early years of the seventeenth century. The territory is now all Brazilian,—the boundaries of that republic extend on the east bank of the Paraná south nearly to the twenty-sixth degree and on the west bank to the twenty-fourth. The rivers Paranapanema and Ivahy are great tributaries coming down from the east between the twenty-second and twenty-third degrees, and draining a vast extent of the plateau that extends to the Brazilian coast mountains between Curitiba and São Paulo, and on their banks the Jesuits established their principal missions.
In those days there were no clearly defined boundaries between the Portuguese and Spanish dominions. From 1580 to 1640 the king of Spain was also monarch of Portugal. The Jesuits held his royal letters patent for the conversion of the Indians of the province of Guayrá—the name which this remote region bore. They had no reason to anticipate that they would be accused of being invaders of Portuguese territory, or that they would be interfered with by any Portuguese subjects of the Spanish Crown. The nearest Portuguese settlement was at São Paulo, from which Guayrá could be reached only by the long and tedious descent of the Tieté River to its confluence with the Paraná, and thencedown that river to the Ivahy. Months would be necessary to make such a journey, great difficulties encountered with waterfalls and rapids, and great privations from want of food in the vast uninhabited regions on the route.
The first Jesuits to arrive after the granting of formal authorisation by the Spanish king were two Italians. They left Asuncion October 10, 1609, and it took them five months of incessant travelling to reach the Paranapanema. The work already done there by the earlier Fathers had borne some fruit. The Indians were prepared for the coming of the new missionaries and readily gathered into the towns which they founded in rapid succession. For the first few years all went well, and within a very short time they claimed to have at least forty thousand souls under their guidance. In 1614 there were 119 Jesuits in Paraguay and Guayrá, and the work of evangelising and reducing to obedience the whole Guarany population of the Paraná valley went on apace. For twenty years these Guayrá missions spread and prospered, while to the east and south the Jesuits acquired more and more influence with the Indians in Paraguay proper, and more and more hemmed in the Creoles of Asuncion.
In 1629 a thunderbolt burst upon Guayrá out of a clear sky. The Portuguese from São Paulo appeared before the Mission of San Antonio and destroyed it utterly, burning the church and houses and driving off the Indians as slaves. Other missions shortly suffered the same fate, and within the short space of three years the towns had beensacked, most of the inhabitants of the region carried off or killed, and the remnants had fled down the river under the leadership of the Fathers. The Paulistas were animated by motives, some good, some bad. Primarily they wished to capture slaves. They hated the Jesuits and had themselves suffered from the latter's system of segregating the aborigines. Only a few decades before, their fathers had destroyed the Jesuit missions near São Paulo, and they were determined not to permit themselves to be hemmed in and crowded out by Indians ruled and protected by Jesuits. They believed in the doctrine of "Brazil for the White Brazilians," and they regarded the Jesuits and their neophytes as natural enemies and fair prey. The sentiment of nationality also animated them. As descendants of Portuguese they hated the Spaniards and their rule. Their allegiance to the Spanish dynasty that had usurped the crown of Portugal sat lightly. The Jesuits came by way of Asuncion, their communications were with the Spanish authorities, and most of them were Spaniards. The Paulistas, as Portuguese, viewed with alarm a rapid spread of Spanish ecclesiastics up the Paraná valley, which threatened soon to reach their own neighbourhood. Avarice, love of adventure, race pride, patriotism, hatred of priestly domination, all co-operated to push them on to undertaking these memorable expeditions.
The great extension of the Jesuits over the northern and eastern regions of the Paraná valley occurred during the period when Hernandarias was the dominant figure of the Plate. Creole though hewas, this remarkable man was a friend to the Indian and to the missionary work of the Jesuits. His aid and encouragement in 1609 were essential to the latter's success, for he might easily have nullified the effect of the royal permission to evangelise Guayrá, a formal document that would have been of little value against the delays and excuses of an unwilling governor aided by the jealous people. After his first term as governor at Buenos Aires, the Spanish government determined to put a stop to the more flagrant of the abuses practised against the savages and created the office of "Protector of the Indians." Hernandarias was named to fill it, and carried out his instructions in a moderate spirit. He understood the country and the situation of the colony well, and did not undertake to abolish Indian slavery. In that tropical climate the whites will not labour in the fields so long as there are Indians who can be forced to work, and the Spaniards still regarded the Indian as little better than an animal.
On the other hand, Hernandarias was too intelligent not to see that there must be restraints on the cruelties and exactions of the Creoles if the Indians of Paraguay were to be saved from the extermination that had been the fate of the Haytians a century before. The outcome was, that though a new code of laws was promulgated by the impracticable Spanish king, which forbade any further enslavement of the aborigines, its provisions were largely disregarded. At the same time, however, the Indians acquired a legal status, and their condition was gradually improved until it became not much worse thanthat of the contemporaneous European peasantry. The Jesuits were guaranteed against interference and allowed to go out into the remoter wilderness and give to the yet unslaved inhabitants the invaluable protection of membership in their missions.
In 1619 the natural and commercial division between Paraguay proper and the rest of the province was officially recognised. The region between the Paraguay and the Paraná rivers was made a separate province, directly dependent upon the Viceroy at Lima and the Audiencia at Charcas in Bolivia. It included officially the Jesuit missions south-east of the Paraná as well as the present territory of Paraguay.
When the Paulistas began their terrible attacks on the Guayrá missions in 1629, the governor of Paraguay refused to send any assistance to the Jesuits. The latter charged him with a corrupt understanding with the invaders, by which he was to share in the profits of the slaves sold. The Order had agreed with the Spanish government not to put any arms into the hands of the Indians, so the latter were defenceless against the Paulistas, who attacked musket in hand. The Creoles and Spaniards in Asuncion resented more and more the presence and power of the Jesuits, and viewed with ill-concealed satisfaction the misfortunes that now overwhelmed the priests. The governor, in declining to send help, was only carrying out the wishes of the people around him. Had the number of whites in Paraguay not been so very small the Jesuits might have been expelled as they were in São Paulo.
We have no accounts of the Jesuit missions in Guayrá, or of the tragedy of their destruction, except those that were written by the Fathers themselves. These are filled with manifest exaggerations and marred by omissions which we have few means of correcting. Nevertheless, the bold outlines of a story that for bravery, pathos, and devotion rivals any ever told are clear and indisputable. Within such a short period as twenty years the Jesuits had not succeeded in training the Guayrá Indians to any very high degree of civilisation. They complain that the Indians were still prone to return to the worship of their devils. Nevertheless, the massive walls of churches which have survived the devastation wrought by three centuries of tropical rains bear witness that the Jesuits had gathered together a multitude of people and had taught them a measure of skilled labour.
Of the completeness of the victory of the Paulistas there is no doubt. Within three years, tens of thousands of Indians were carried off to São Paulo,and hardly a town was left standing in the province of Guayrá. Father Montoya, chief Jesuit, has left an account of the Hegira which he led down the river. Though he is silent as to the part he took himself, it is hard to read his pages and not give him a place among the world's great heroes. Twelve thousand Indians of every sex and age assembled on the Paranapanema with the few belongings which they had been able to bring from the homes that they were forced to abandon. The Paulistas were daily expected to return, and the only hope of escape was to float down the river and get beyond the Grand Cataract of the Paraná. The journey to the beginning of the falls was made without any great losses; there the difficulties began. Ninety miles of falls and rapids intervene between navigable water above and below the Grand Cataract. Across the river valley extends a mountain chain with slopes rugged and covered with dense vegetation. The river divides into various channels, and the sides of the gorges are clothed in cane-brakes and tangled forests through which a path had to be cut with machetes. These poor Jesuits and their thousands of scared, patient Indians had no boats awaiting them at the foot of the falls, so they had to continue their dreary passage through the gorges and cane-brakes, where wild Indians lay in ambush with poisoned arrows, until at last a place was reached where canoes could be built. Still they struggled on, the indomitable Jesuits taking every precaution. Though out of immediate danger from the Paulistas when they had passed the cataract, the Spaniards onthe right bank below were hardly less to be feared. They were waiting on the shore of the Paraná for news of the fugitives in order to pounce on them and make a rich haul of slaves. The provisions were exhausted, but the Jesuits dared not apply for help to the Creoles. Fever broke out and, sick and starving, the devoted Jesuits and their uncomplaining followers worked away on their boats and rafts. At last they got them ready, and, slipping past the Spanish settlements in the night, they finally reached some small Jesuit missions near the mouth of the Iguassú, five hundred miles from their starting-point.
FALLS.GUAYRÁ FALLS.
The Jesuits resolved to evacuate Guayrá completely and to build up their power anew in the country between the Paraná and the Uruguay. Within the next few years they had occupied the country that is now the Argentine Territory of the missions. This tract lay directly across the Paraná, from that part of Paraguay proper in which the Jesuits were most powerful, to the other side of the Uruguay, where was a fertile territory which proved an excellent field for the extension of the settlement. Before many years these missions stretched in a broad band from the centre of Paraguay three hundred miles to the south-east; they dominated southern Paraguay and half the present Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul with the country that lies between, while their towns lined both banks of the Upper Uruguay and the Middle Paraná, cutting off the Creoles from extending their settlements up either of these great rivers.
Now that the priests had concentrated their forcesso near, the alarm of the Creoles became acute. The Jesuits managed to obtain the dismissal of the governor who had refused to send them aid when they were attacked by the Paulistas and were driven from Guayrá, but his successor also became a partisan of the Creoles as soon as he reached Asuncion. He visited the missions near the river Paraná and ordered that they be secularised on the ground that these regions had already been subjected by Spanish arms before its occupation by the priests. But the Jesuits were good lawyers and had powerful friends at every Court, so the governor was forced to reverse his action.
The next governor helped to make the Jesuits secure from Paulista interference below the Grand Cataract, by defeating an important expedition which had reached the new missions. The Paulistas did not confine their aggressions to the missions, but alarmed the Spanish Creoles themselves by penetrating west of the Paraná into Paraguay proper. Even Asuncion did not feel safe for a time. The Jesuits had now begun to arm and drill the Indians. Though the Paulistas made expeditions from time to time, and the Spanish and Jesuit frontier settlements were frequently aroused by the news of a bloody raid and of the rapid depredations of a band of these dreaded marauders, there was never again such wholesale destruction as had taken place in Guayrá. The frontiers of the Spanish and Portuguese peoples on the Paraná remain to this day substantially as they were fixed by the Paulista expeditions of 1630 to 1640.
In their conflict with the Jesuits, the Creoles shortly received a valuable reinforcement in Bishop Cardenas, a very able and energetic prelate, and a man gifted as a ruler and statesman. Born in the city of Charcas, on the Bolivian plateau, he was a Creole of the Creoles. He became a great missionary and evangelist throughout Upper Peru and Tucuman, acquiring wonderful fame and popularity by his eloquence. In spite of the fact that he was a Creole, he was immensely popular among the Indians, and seems to have been a natural leader of both branches of the native population. He bitterly hated the Jesuits. As a member of the rival Franciscan Order, his professional jealousy was aroused by their success, and his Creole prejudices were outraged by their efforts to prevent the extension of white power among the aborigines.
By sheer force of ability and eloquence, he rose into great prominence in southern Spanish America, and was rewarded for his successful labours in Tucuman by being appointed Bishop of Paraguay. There the Creoles accepted him as their leader, and he soon became the dominant figure in the community. He quarrelled repeatedly with the governor, but such was his force of character, and the skill with which he took advantage of the superstitious reverence for his apostolic office, that he invariably achieved his ends. Once the governor, at the head of a file of soldiers, presented himself at the bishop's door to arrest a fugitive whom the bishop had undertaken to protect. When the door was opened there stood the dauntless priest in fullcanonicals, defying the governor to cross his threshold. He excommunicated the governor and every soldier who had dared take part in this affront to his dignity, and, like Hildebrand, was only appeased when the governor had begged for pardon on his knees.
When the governor died, Bishop Cardenas succeededad interim. His popularity and prestige were unbounded, and his audacity and courage unprecedented. Uniting in himself the religious, civil, and popular power, he controlled the forces of the community more completely than any one who had preceded him. His great work was the humiliation and destruction of the Jesuits. He hampered their insidious spread on the hither side of the Paraná, and attempted the secularisation of many of their missions. In 1649 he took the audacious step of issuing a decree expelling all the members of the Society of Jesus, and he actually drove the Fathers from their churches and schools in Asuncion itself. The Jesuits appealed to the Viceroy, and a governor was sent out to depose him.
Twenty years had now elapsed since the Jesuits had armed the Mission Indians and organised them into an efficient militia. An army was, therefore, ready to the new governor's hand. The Creoles of western Paraguay were riotous and tumultuous, but in that tropical climate they had lost much of the military capacity of their Spanish ancestors. The number of people of Spanish descent was small and while the secular Indians made admirable soldiers when disciplined and well led, they had never beenorganised by the Creoles for serious warfare. The military system of the Jesuits immediately proved its superiority. Aided by the prestige of his Viceregal commission, the new governor at the head of the Jesuit army quickly overcame the hastily gathered levies of the Bishop.
For the next one hundred and twenty years the Jesuits maintained their system in south-eastern Paraguay and the regions on both banks of the Paraná and the Upper Uruguay. Until 1728 their territory was nominally under the jurisdiction of the governor of Asuncion. Really, however, it was an independent republic ruled by a superior whose capital was at Candelaria, and who was actually responsible to no one except his General at Rome and the authorities at Madrid. In the secular part of Paraguay, the formerly turbulent and secular Creoles sank more and more into the indifference characteristic of the Indians who surrounded them. Early in the eighteenth century a governor named Antequera, whom the Viceregal authorities attempted to depose, was forcibly maintained for a time by the Paraguayan Creoles—probably the earliest instance of an important movement toward independence which occurred in South America. The Paraguayans only yielded when a compromise was offered. The old ferocity which the original conquerors had felt against the Indians gave place gradually to kindlier sentiments. From slaves the Indians rose into serfs and then into peasants, living on good terms with the proprietors of their lands, and not more oppressed by Spanish officials thanthe whites themselves. Secular Paraguay, shut in on the west by the impenetrable Chaco with its hordes of dreaded wild Indians, and on the east by the Jesuit territory, could not expand. Indeed the impulse toward conquest and exploration which so distinguished the Paraguayan Creoles in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had completely died out as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.
In 1728, the Jesuit republic was formally detached from the jurisdiction of Paraguay and placed under that of the government of Buenos Aires. The missions were all situated on or near the banks of the Upper Paraná and Uruguay, and their line of communication with the outside world ran directly to Buenos Aires. They had few commercial relations with Asuncion and it was inconvenient to maintain even a shadow of political relation with that capital. The Jesuit missions prospered, although, curiously enough, their population remained stationary. South and east of the Paraná, the country which they occupied was mostly an open, rolling plain admirably suited for pasturage. Herding cattle was the chief employment of the Indians and the chief source of the exports. However, in the forests north-west of the Paraná, agriculture was more practised, and the principal exports thence were the matte tea and timber. In the pastoral country the Jesuits did not expand farther. They had already gathered most of the Indians who inhabited that region into their missions, and the natural increase of population did not justify any new settlements. But in the woodedcountry across the Paraná a few tribes of Guaranies had hitherto escaped subjection to either Creoles or Jesuits, and farther to the west, in the great Chaco, there were many tribes of savage and intractable Indians. In both these directions the Jesuits kept up their missionary efforts. In Paraguay, they were successful and converted many tribes of the northern part of that country, but in the Chaco they could make little progress.
In 1769 the king of Spain issued his famous decree banishing the Jesuits from all his dominions. It was feared that in the centre of their power on the Upper Paraná they might offer resistance. They commanded a population of more than two hundred thousand Indians, fairly well armed and disciplined and absolutely devoted to them; nevertheless, they submitted quietly. Spanish officials replaced the Jesuits in control of the civil and commercial interests of the mission towns, and priests of other Orders were sent up to continue spiritual instruction. The Spanish officials were, however, not successful in holding the Indians together. Their exactions and cruelties drove the Indians to despair, and within a very few years emigration began. The seven missions to the east of the Uruguay had been traded by Spain to Portugal in 1750, and most of their inhabitants had then been killed or driven across the Uruguay. The most populous missions lay between the Uruguay and the Paraná, in the territory that to-day forms the upper part of Corrientes, and the Missions Territory. A large proportion of their inhabitants fled down the Uruguay into Entre Riosand Uruguay proper. Those on the west side of the Paraná largely remained or removed only far enough to coalesce with the secular Indians of Paraguay; some of the outlying and more remote missions were abandoned altogether, and Paraguay then assumed its present extent.
The population was fairly homogeneous, and its vast majority was composed of descendants of the aborigines, with comparatively few Spaniards and Creoles of mixed blood forming the upper strata of society. The country felt few of the quickening and disturbing influences which were already animating the regions at the mouth of the river toward the end of the eighteenth century. Little effort was necessary to get a subsistence from the teeming soil, and, content with their luscious oranges, their matte, and their unlimited tobacco, the Paraguayans led an idyllic existence. They had little sympathy with the turbulent, active-minded population which was crowding into Buenos Aires and making it a commercial, political, and intellectual focus. Agricultural in their habits, they disliked the hard-riding gauchos of the southern plains hardly less than the turbulent Indians of the Chaco. In the movements that preceded the revolution of 1810 they took no part.
On the 25th of May, 1810, a revolutionary movement in Buenos Aires overthrew the Spanish Viceroy. Its leaders were young Creole liberals, natives of Buenos Aires, and a junta was formed from their number which undertook the supreme direction of affairs. Prompt measures were taken to overthrow the Spanish provincial authorities and to secure the co-operation and obedience of all the subdivisions of the Viceroyalty. Manuel Belgrano, one of the enthusiastic leaders of the movement, was sent up the river to take possession of Entre Rios and Corrientes for the junta, and to attack the Spanish governor of Paraguay. He was accompanied by only a few hundred troops, but he counted on the sympathy and help of the people among whom he was going.
In Entre Rios and Corrientes, which were mere administrative divisions of the province of Buenos Aires, he encountered no difficulty. The gauchos, who formed almost the whole population, hated outside control and cared little who claimed to besupreme at Buenos Aires. Belgrano marched through the centre of these districts and reached the Paraná at the old Jesuit capital of Candelaria. Once across the river he found a different atmosphere. The home-loving Indian population regarded Belgrano's band as invaders and responded promptly to the call of the Spanish governor, old Velasco, to take up arms and repel the aggression. The Paraguayans hated the Buenos Aireans with an intensity born of ignorance and isolation, and a considerable force of militia assembled for the defence of Asuncion. Among its most popular leaders was a native Paraguayan named Yegros. Belgrano was not opposed until he approached within sixty miles of Asuncion, but on the 19th of January, 1811, the Paraguayans turned and crushed his little army. He retreated to the south and on March 9th was captured with his whole force.
This repulse ended, once for all, the hope cherished by the Buenos Aires liberals of persuading or compelling the submission of Paraguay. The battle of the 19th of January, and the hostile attitude of the whole Paraguayan people, definitely assured Paraguay's independence from Buenos Aires. It soon became evident that independence from Spain had been secured as well. In contact with their Argentine prisoners, the more intelligent Paraguayan leaders were quickly convinced of the advantages which home rule would bring to Paraguay, and that they themselves ought to control the government until affairs in Spain should be settled. The governor had no Spanish troops nor any hope of receivinghelp, either from the distracted mother-country or from the governors of other parts of South America. Each of them had enough to do in taking care of himself. Velasco's secretary was an educated Buenos Airean, a liberal, and an autonomist. He plotted the overthrow of his chief in connection with a Paraguayan officer who was popular with the troops in Asuncion.
Two months after Belgrano's surrender, a bloodless revolution occurred. The governor offered no resistance; he simply stepped to one side and became a private citizen, while the patriots took possession of the barracks and began casting about blindly for a solid basis for a new government. After a good deal of confusion the prominent citizens of the province were called together in a sort of rude Constituent Congress, and a junta was formed. General Yegros and Dr. Francia were the two most prominent and popular men in the country, and they were naturally and inevitably selected as chief members. Yegros had been the principal leader of the militia, and Francia was considered the most learned and able man in the community. He was a lawyer who had become a sort of demigod to the lower classes by his fearless advocacy of their rights, and inspired almost superstitious reverence by his reputation for learning and disinterestedness. He was selected as secretary, while Yegros, an ignorant soldier, became president of the junta. Francia's abilities and courage immediately made him the dominating figure. Jealousies arose and he stepped out for a while, but the weaker men who succeeded him could not control the situation. Two years later a popular assembly met which was ready to submit to his advice in everything. The junta was dismissed and he and Yegros were invested with supreme power under the title of Consuls. A year later he forced Yegros out and with general consent assumed the position of sole executive, and in 1816 he was formally declared supreme and perpetual dictator.
For the next twenty-five years he was the Government of Paraguay. History does not record another instance in which a single man so dominated and controlled a people. A solitary, mysterious figure, of whose thoughts, purposes, and real character little is known, the worst acts of his life were the most picturesque and alone have been recorded. Although the great Carlyle includes him among the heroes whose memory mankind should worship, the opinion of his detractors is likely to triumph. Francia will go down to history as a bloody-minded, implacable despot, whose influence and purposes were wholly evil. After reading all that has been written about this singular character, my mind inclines more to the judgment of Carlyle. I feel that the vivid imagination of the great Scotchman has pierced the clouds which enshrouded the spirit of a great and lonely man and has seen the soul of Francia as he was. Cruel, suspicious, ruthless, and heartless as he undeniably became, his acts will not bear the interpretation that his purposes were selfish or that he was animated by mere vulgar ambition.
The population over which he ruled had for centuries been trained to obedience by the Jesuits andthe Creole landowners. The Creoles were few and the Spaniards still fewer. Francia based his power upon the Indian population and not on the little aristocracy whose members boasted of white blood. Convinced that the Indians were not fit for self-government, he also believed that it would be disastrous to permit the white oligarchy to rule. He proposed to save Paraguay from the civil disturbances that distracted the rest of South America. He therefore absorbed all power in his own hands and ruthlessly repressed any indications of insubordination among those of Spanish blood. The Indians blindly obeyed him, and he relentlessly pursued the Creoles and the priests, seeming to regard them only as dangerous firebrands who might at any time start up a conflagration in the peaceful body politic, and not as citizens entitled to the protection of the State.
He absorbed in his own person all the functions of government; he had no confidants and no assistants; he allowed no Paraguayan to approach him on terms of equality. When he died, a careful search failed to reveal any records of the immense amount of governmental business which he had transacted during thirty years. The orders for executions were simply messages signed by him and returned, to be destroyed as soon as they had been carried out. The longer he lived the more completely did he apply his system of absolutism, and the more confident he became that he alone could govern his people for his people's good. He adopted a policy of commercial isolation, and intercourse with the outside world was absolutely forbidden. Foreigners were not permitted to enter the country without a special permit, and once there were rarely allowed to leave.
JOSE RODRIGUEZ GASPAR FRANCIA.JOSÉ RODRIGUEZ GASPAR FRANCIA.[From an old wood-cut.]
He neither sent nor received consuls nor ministers to foreign nations. Foreign vessels were excluded from the Paraguay River and allowed to visit only one port in the south-eastern corner of the country. He was the sole foreign merchant. The communistic system inherited from the Jesuits was developed and extended to the secular parts of the country. The government owned two-thirds of the land and conducted great farms and ranches in various parts of the territory. If labour was needed in gathering crops, Francia had recourse to forced enlistment. Those Indian missions which remained free he brought gradually under his own control and followed the old Jesuit policy of compelling the wild Indians to work like other citizens. Dreading interference by Spain, Brazil, or Buenos Aires, he improved the military forces and began the organisation of the whole population into a militia. His policy, however, was peaceful, and the difficulty of getting arms up the river, past the forces of the Argentine warring factions, prevented his organising an army fit for offensive operations even if he had desired to have one.
As he grew older he became more solitary and ferocious. Always a gloomy and peculiar man, absorbed in his studies and making no account of the ordinary pleasures and interests of mankind, he had reached the age of fifty-five and assumed supremepower, without marrying. His public labours still further cut him off from thoughts of family and friends; and, although it has been asserted that he married a young Frenchwoman when he was past seventy, nothing is known about her. It is certain that he left no children and died attended only by servants. His severities against the educated classes increased; he suffered from frequent fits of hypochondria; he ordered wholesale executions, and seven hundred political prisoners filled the jails when he died. His moroseness increased year by year. He feared assassination and occupied several houses, letting no one know where he was going to sleep from one night to another, and when walking the streets kept his guards at a distance before and behind him. Woe to the enemy or suspect who attracted his attention! Such was the terror inspired by this dreadful old man that the news that he was out would clear the streets. A white Paraguayan literally dared not utter his name; during his lifetime he was "El Supremo," and after he was dead for generations he was referred to simply as "El Defunto." For years when men spoke of him they looked behind them and crossed themselves, as if dreading that the mighty old man could send devils to spy upon them,—at least this is the story of Francia's enemies who have made it their business to hand his name down to execration. The real reason may have been that Francia's successors regarded defamation of "El Defunto" as an indication of unfriendliness to themselves.
Devil or saint, hypochondriac or hero, actuated bymorbid vanity or by the purest altruism, there is no difficulty in estimating the results of Francia's work and the extent of his abilities. That he had a will of iron and a capacity beyond the ordinary is proven by his life before he became dictator, as well as his successes afterwards. All authorities agree that he had acquired as a lawyer a remarkable ascendancy over the common people by his fearlessness in maintaining their causes before the courts and corrupt officials. He did not rise by any sycophant arts; indeed, he never veiled the contempt he felt for the party schemers and officials around him. When he had supreme power in his hands he used it for no selfish indulgences. His life was austere and abstemious; parsimonious for himself, he was lavish for the public. He would accept no present, and either returned those sent him, or sent back their value in money. Though he had been educated for the priesthood and had never been out of South America he had absorbed liberal religious principles from his reading. Nothing could have been more likely to offend the Catholic Indians, upon whose good will his power rested, than his refusal to attend mass, but he was honest enough with himself and with them not to simulate a sentiment which he did not feel. In his manners and life he was absolutely modest; he received any who chose to see him; if he was terrible it was to the wealthy and the powerful; the humblest Indian received a hearing and justice. During his reign Paraguay remained undisturbed, wrapped in a profound peace; the population rapidly increased, and though commerce andmanufactures did not flourish, nor the new ideas which were transforming the face of the civilised world penetrate within his barriers, food and clothing were plenty and cheap, and the Paraguayans prospered in their own humble fashion. Though they might not sell their delicious matte, there was no limitation on its domestic use, and although money was not plentiful and foreign goods were a rarity, a fat steer could be bought for a dollar, and want was unknown.
The old man lived until 1840 in the full possession of unquestioned supreme power, dying at the age of eighty-three years. His final illness lasted only a few days, and he went on attending to business to the very end. When asked to appoint a successor he refused, bitterly saying that there would be no lack of heirs. His legitimate and natural successor could only be that man who could raise himself through the mass by his force of character and prove himself capable of dominating the disorganising elements of Creole society.