Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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."

      It is interesting to see in the present year the same dis- position — oflPensive and defensive, the individual superiority of the descendants of Sepe and Cacambo, and the leader- ship of one more terrible than the terrible Father Balda.

       I propose to reconsider this interesting subject in a forthcoming

      volume, " The Lowlands of the Brazil."

      8

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      The second is the secret working by the Missioners of gold mines — a subject kept in the profoundest obscurity. A host of writers^ the latest being M. Demersay^ doubts their very existence, and makes the precious metals an extract of agriculture. But their opinions are of little value in the presence of earlier authors ; for instance, of ^^ Mr. R. M.^ ['^ A Relation of a Voyage to Buenos Ayres, 1716 â– 'â– '), who declares that the Misiones had gold diggings, and of Mr. Davie^ (^' Letters from Paraguay"), who, travelling in 1796-1798^ asserts that the Fathers of the Reductions had 80,000 to 100,000 disciplined troops to defend their mines. The latter author saw pure gold collected from the banks of the Uruguay, upon which, we may re- member, were seven of the thirty Missions. He imprudently travelled through the old Missions in a semi-clerical dis- guise, and he suddenly disappeared without leaving a trace. I have myself handled a lump of virgin silver from the High- lands of Corrientes, known as the Sierra de las Misiones ; and a French painter at S. Paulo, who was also aware of its existence, proposed to exploit the diggings, setting out from Brazilian Rio Grande do Sul with an armed party strong enough to beat off hostile '^ Indians.""

      The Jesuits, it may be remembered, were almost all foreigners — Italians and French, Germans and Portuguese, English and Irish. Their communistic system, their gold, and their troops at last seriously alarmed the Spanish monarchy. Men had heard of Nicholas Neengiru, " King Nicholas of Paraguay ;" f and a proverb-loving race quoted the saying, " La mentira es hija de Algo." By his decree of April 27, 1767, issued some 220 years after the Jesuits had landed upon the shores of South America,

       I do not know why this traveller has had the honour to be so severely

      abused by M. Alexandre Dumas (pere).

      t Concerning this personage, see Southey, vol. iii. 469.

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      Charles СКАЧАТЬ