Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ Spaniards had settled and had laid the foundations of future empire. The Jesuits began to form their rival government in the regions to the east and south-east of the actual republic, the fertile valleys of the Rivers Parana and Uruguay ; and between 1685 and 1760 they established the Misiones or Reductions of Paraguay. The whole Guarani Republic, for it might so be called, contained thirty-three Pueblos or towns. Of these, seven, now hopelessly ruined, lay on the left bank of the Uruguay River ; fifteen, also destroyed, were in the modern provinces of Corrientes and Entre Rios ; and eleven, of which remnants of church or chapel still exist, were in Paraguay Proper, that is to say, north of the Great River. These thirty-three Reductions numbered at one time 100,000 souls and 743,608 head of cattle.

      It is a popular error to suppose that all Paraguay was occupied by the Jesuits ; their theocracy extended over but a small portion of the modern Republic ; on the other hand their influence flew far and wide. In the west and about Asuncion was the civil government, one of pure immobility as regards progress, and occupied only by contemptible wars, civil and foreign. The clergy was in the last stage of corruption and ignorance, except when its own interests were concerned. New Spain alone numbered 15,000 priests. About 1649 South America supported 840 monkeries with enormous estates : a will that left nothiog to a religious house was held an irreligious act in those days, and even now the prejudice is not quite obsolete. Moreover, every

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      landed property was mulcted in impositions known as Capellanias. Its nunneries were equally wealthy, and most of them admitted only ladies of Spanish origin, thus foster- ing the spirit of aristocracy in the very bosom of religion.

      It is interesting to see how, in the organization of those early times, we find adumbrated the system of Paraguay in the heart of the nineteenth century. Then, and not as vulgarly supposed with Dr. Francia, commenced the isola- tion which afterwards gave to Paraguay the titles of Japan and " Chine Americaine.^ Then began the sterile, extra- vagant theocratic despotism which made the race what it still is, an automaton that acts as peasantry and soldiery ; not a people but a flock, a servum pecus knowing no rule but that of their superiors, and whose history may be summed up in absolute submission, fanaticism, blind obe- dience, heroic and barbarous devotion to the tyrant that rules it, combined with crass ignorance, hatred of, and contempt for, the foreigner. Then first arose the oligarchy, the slavery of the masses, the incessant corvees which still endure, the regimentation of labour, and even the storing of arms and ammunition. Bearing this fact in mind, we have the key that opens many a fact, so inexplicable to the world, in the events of the last five years^ war.

      The Jesuits appeared as Thaumaturgi, missioners and martyrs : in those days they headed progress and they strove to advance science, until the latter outstripping them, they determined to trip her up. Their system justified hunting- expeditions to catch souls for the Church ; and Azara has well described their ingenuity in peopling the Mission of San Joachim. By founding in every city churches and religious houses they monopolized education, beginning even with the babe, and by immense territorial property they rose to influence and power. The Guaranis, taught to hold themselves a saintly and chosen^ a privileged and

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      God-elected race, and delighted to be so patriarclially and caciqually ruled, prostrated themselves before the Fathers in body and mind ; looked up to them as dog does to man, and bound up in them their own physical as well as spiritual existence.

      The Superior of the Missions being empowered by the Pope to confirm, bishops were not wanted. That high official usually resided at Candelaria, on the left bank of the upper Parana River. In each of the reduced villages was a ^' College^^ for two Jesuits — misite illos binos, the practice of the earliest Christian Apostles, was with them a rule as in Japan and Dahome. One charged with temporals was the Rector, Misionero, Cmxta or Curate ; the other, called Doctrinero or Companero, the Vice-Curate, managed spiritual matters. Each settlement also had its Cabildo or municipality, composed of a Corregidor, an Alcalde (magistrate) and his assessors; but as in the native corps of the Anglo-Indian army, these were native officers under command of the white strangers. The Fathers also decided, without appeal to the ordinary judges or to the Spanish tribunals, all cases civil and criminal; the only rule or law was the Jesuit^s will, and the punishments were inflicted through the Cabildos over which they presided. Presently the royal tithes and taxes were replaced by a fixed levy in order to avoid communication with the agent at the head-quarters of civil power.

      A system of complete uniformity was extended even to the plan of the settlement and of the houses. Travellers in the Missions have deemed themselves victims of delusion when after riding many leagues from one Reduction they found themselves in a facsimile of that which they had left. All the settlements had, like the settlers, saints^ names. The normal plan was a heap of pauper huts clustering about a church of the utmost procurable magnificence, and

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      the establishments of the Fathers were in the church, not in the hut. The Jesuits were forbidden to converse singly with women or to 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.

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