Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton
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receive them in their home ; but Jose Basilio da Gama and their other adversaries declare that most of them had concubines and families.
The community was a mere phalanstery. The Guaranis w^ere taught by their Fathers to hear and to obey like schoolboys, and their lives were divided between the chapel and farm work. Their tasks were changed by Jesuit art into a kind of religious rejoicing, a childish opera. They marched afield to the sound of fiddles, following a pro- cession that bore upon the Anda or platform a figure of the O^oTOKog ; this was placed under an arbour, whilst the hoe was plied to the voice of psalmody, and the return to rest was as solemn and musical as the going forth to toil. This system is in fact that of the Central African Negro — I have described the merrymakings which accompany the tilling of Unyamwezi and the harvest-home of Galla-land. The crops of yerba and tobacco, dry pulse and cotton, cut with the same ceremony, were stored with hides, timber, and coarse hand-woven stuff's, in public garners under the direction of the Padres. After feeding and clothing his lieges. King Jesuit exported the remains of the common stock in his own boats, and exchanged it at Buenos Aires for the general wants — hardware, drugs, looms, agricultural implements, fine clothes to be given as prizes, and splendid stuff's and ornaments for the Chm-ch. No Guarani could buy or sell ; he was, however, graciously permitted to change one kind of food for another. Feminine work was submitted to the same rule as masculine, and " Dii laboribus omnia vendunt'^ became strictly true, but only of the priestly purchasers.
In some Missions the toil was constant and severe, indeed so much so as to crush out the spirit of the
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labourers. A curious report^ alluded to at the time by most Jesuitical and anti-Jesuit writers^ and ill-temperedly noticed by Southey^ spread far and wide — namely, that the Fathers were compelled to arouse their flocks somewhat before the working hours, and to insist upon their not preferring Morpheus to Venus, and thus neglecting the duty of begetting souls to be saved. I have found the tradition still lingering amongst the modern Paraguayans. Everything, pleasures as well as labours, meals and prayers, was regulated and organized by the Fathers. The saints day was duly celebrated with feasting, dancing, drinking, tournaments, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting ; in the simple, childish Indian brain religion consisted of fetes and processions. The ceremonies of worship and even the mode of entering church were made matters of etiquette. The Fathers wore their golden copes ; the children, robed in white, swung their censers, and the faithful paced in complacent ranks with measured steps under the perfumed shade of their orange groves. The description reads like a scene of piping and fiddling in a play. Dress was regulated — the women wore petticoats and armless chemises girt at the waist, with hair plaited into one or two tails and adorned with a crimson flower; the men were clad in ponchos and drawers ; both sexes looked like big babies, and they went barefoot, still the fashion of middle and lower class Paraguay.
Education in the Missions was, in the seventeenth century, what the Republic has preserved in the nineteenth. The Jesuits, whose university was at Cordoba in the modern province of Santa Fe, had their o\>ti printing-presses in the Reductions ; they were diligent students of the barbarous native dialects, which they soon advanced by means of grammars and vocabularies to the rank of semi-civilized tongues; they did the thinking for their converts, but they
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taught them to read, to recite the Doctrina Christiana in Guarani, and to study certain books of piety. The people were forbidden to learn Spanish; and when the Inquisition put a rindex"' poor Robinson Crusoe (1790), doubtless because he managed to live so long without the aid of a ghostly father, we may imagine what must have been the Jesuitical succedaneum for education. To educate is to enfranchise, to enfranchise is to disestablish, or rather to disendow. We in England at least understand that, other- wise we should long ago have made education compulsory _, gratuitous, secular, universal.
The Jesuits established their system by the means most efficacious amongst savages, the grasp of the velvet-gloved iron hand. Their prime object was complete isolation, to draw a cordon between the Missions and the outer world ; even communication between the " Indians'*^ of the several Reductions was rarely allowed. It succeeded, this deadening, brutalizing religious despotism, amongst the humble settled Guaranis who were eager to be tyrannized over, and the tree planted by the hand of St. Ignatius began to bear its legitimate fruit in 1864. I need hardly say that the fruit is the utter extinction of the race, which the progress of mankind is sweeping from the face of the earth. When tried amongst the fiercer and more warlike nomads of the Gran Chaco the system was an utter failure. The Guaranis themselves made, as might be expected, so little progress in civil life that after the expulsion of the Fathers they found self-government impossible, and Sint ut sunt aut non sint^ seems to have been the clerical axiom. It was deemed necessary to organize under the Dominicans an imitative Jesuitism. The converts speedily relapsed into their pris- tine barbarism, and many of them flying the settlements returned to their woods and swamps.
The Missions of Paraguay have often been described — of
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course in the two opposite ways. The Jesuit Charlevoix and the devout Muratori^ undeterred by qualms of con- science touching pious frauds, have given the rosy side of the view. And considered from the clerical stand-point, these Missions were the true primitive Christian idea of communism, the society presided over by Saint Paul, and the establishment which Fourier, Robert Owen, Mr. Harris, and a host of others have attempted to revive in this our day. Severe taskmasters, and carrying out propagandism by the sweat of their scholars^ brows, the Fathers made this world a preparatory school for a nobler future ; they crushed out the man that he might better become an angel, and they forced him to be a slave that he might wax fit for the kingdom of heaven. The learned and honest D. Felix de Azara (Vol. I. Chapter XIII.), who visited the Missions shortly after the expulsion of the Jesuits, and a host of less trustworthy and more hostile authors, show the reverse of the medal. The latest study upon the subject of the Jesuit Reductions is that of the late Dr. Martin de Moussy. Its geo- graphy must be studied with some reserve, but much of the historical matter was, I am assured, contributed by the literary ex-President of the Argentine Confederation, D. Bartholome Mitre.
In most writings, especially those inspired by the Jesuits, two remarkable features of the Missions-* system have either been ignored, or have been slurred over.
The first is the military organization which the preachers of a religion of peace and goodwill to man introduced amongst their neo-Christians. All the adult males were regimented; the houses were defended by deep fosses and stout palisades ; leave was obtained from Spain to manu- facture gunpowder and to use fire-arms, and when these were wanting the converts were armed with native weapons. The ostensible cause was the hostility of the " Mamelucos,'-'
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the bold Brazilian Paulistas, the " sinful and miserable Paulitians or Paulopolitans, whom Muratori attacks with the extreme of odium theologicum. I may here remark that no movement has been more systematically maligned and misrepresented^ than the hostilities carried on between the years 1620 and 1640 by the people of S. Paulo. They had justly expelled from their young city the meddling and greedy Jesuits ; and the employes of the society, Charlevoix, for instance, happened at this time to have the ear of Europe. The quarrel was purely political. The Spanish Crown, which had absorbed Portugal in 1580, was en- croaching rapidly through its propagandists, as does Russia in High Asia, upon the territory claimed by and belonging to the Paulistas ; and the latter, who in that matter were true patriots, determined to hold their country's own with the sword. I do not wonder to see half-read men like Wilcocke (p. 286) and Mansfield (p. 441) led wrong by the heroic assurance of the Jesuit historians ; but the accurate Southey, a helluo librorum, ought certainly to have known better.* Working, however, the Mameluco invasion, the Company of Jesus managed to form under the sway of its General an imperium in imperio, which in ] 750 could resist the several campaigns directed against it by the united arms of the Brazil, of Buenos Aires, and of Montevideo. We may still learn something from their military regulations ; for instance, from the order of Father Michoni, " The chil- dren ought also to be drilled, and to undergo review."
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