What a contrast! The manners are as depraved, as beastly, as ferocious as in Dahomey[70] or the country of the Fellatahs. The same barbarous love of ornament, combined with the same indifference to form; beauty consists in color, and provided a garment is of gaudy red, and adorned with imitation gold, taste is little concerned with useless attention to materials or fitness; and as for cleanliness, this is a superfluity for which no one cares. You desire an audience with some high functionary: you are ushered into the presence of an athletic negro, stretched on a wooden bench, his head wrapped in a dirty, tattered handkerchief, and surmounted by a three-cornered hat, profusely decorated with gold. The general apparel consists of an embroidered coat (without suitable nether-garments), a huge sword, and slippers. You converse with this mass of flesh, and are anxious to discover what ideas can occupy a mind under so unpromising an exterior. You find an intellect of the lowest order combined with the most savage pride, which can be equalled only by as profound and incurable a laziness. If the individual before you opens his mouth, he will retail all the hackneyed common-places that the papers have wearied you with for the last half century. This barbarian knows them by heart; he has very different interests, different instincts; he has no ideas of his own. He will talk like Baron Holbach, reason like Grimm, and at the bottom has no serious care except chewing tobacco, drinking spirits, butchering his enemies, and propitiating his sorcerers. The rest of the time he sleeps.
The state is divided into two factions, not separated by incompatibility of politics, but of color—the negroes and the mulattoes. The latter, doubtless, are superior in intelligence, as I have already remarked with regard to the Dominicans. The European blood has modified the nature of the African, and in a community of whites, with good models constantly before their eyes, these men might be converted into useful members of society. But, unfortunately, the superiority of numbers belongs at present to the negroes, and these, though removed from Africa by several generations, are the same as in their native clime. Their supreme felicity is idleness; their supreme reason, murder. Among the two divisions of the island the most intense hatred has always prevailed. The history of independent Hayti is nothing but a long series of massacres: massacres of mulattoes by the negroes, when the latter were strongest; of the negroes by the mulattoes, when the power was in their hands. The institutions, with all their boasted liberality and philanthropy, are of no use whatever. They sleep undisturbedly and impotently upon the paper on which they were written, and the savage instincts of the population reign supreme. Conformably to the law of nature which I pointed out before, the negro, who belongs to a race exhibiting little aptitude for civilization, entertains the most profound horror for all other races. Thus we see the Haytien negroes energetically repel the white man from their territory, and forbid him even to enter it; they would also drive out the mulattoes, and contemplate their ultimate extermination. Hostility to the foreigner is the primum mobile of their local policy. Owing to the innate laziness of the race, agriculture is abandoned, industry not known even by name, commerce drivelling; misery prevents the increase of the population, while continual wars, insurrections, and military executions diminish it continually. The inevitable and not very remote consequence of such a condition of things is to convert into a desert a country whose fertility and natural resources enriched generations of planters, which in exports and commercial activity surpassed even Cuba.[71]
These examples of St. Domingo and the Sandwich Islands seem to me conclusive. I cannot, however, forbear, before definitely leaving the subject, from mentioning another analogous fact, the peculiar character of which greatly confirms my position. I allude to the attempts of the Jesuit missionaries to civilize the natives of Paraguay.[72]
These missionaries, by their exalted intelligence and self-sacrificing courage, have excited universal admiration; and the most decided enemies of their order have never refused them an unstinted tribute of praise. If foreign institutions have ever had the slightest chance of success with a nation, these assuredly had it, based as they were upon the power of religious feelings, and supported and applied with a tact as correct as it was refined. The fathers were of the pretty general opinion that barbarism was to nations what childhood is to the individual, and that the more savage and untutored we find a people, the younger we may conclude them to be. To educate their neophytes to adolescence, they therefore treated them like children. Their government was as firm in its views and commands as it was mild and affectionate in its forms. The aborigines of the American continent have generally a tendency to republicanism; a monarchy or aristocracy is rarely found among them, and then in a very restricted form. The Guaranis of Paraguay did not differ, in this respect, from their congeners. By a happy circumstance, however, these tribes displayed rather more intelligence and less ferocity than their neighbors, and seemed capable, to some extent, of conceiving new wants and adopting new ideas. About one hundred and twenty thousand souls were collected in the villages of the missions, under the guidance of the fathers. All that experience, daily study, and active charity could teach the Jesuits, was employed for the benefit of their pupils; incessant efforts were made to hasten success, without hazarding it by rashness. In spite of all these cares, however, it was soon felt that the most absolute authority over the neophytes could hardly constrain them to persist in the right path, and occasions were not wanting that revealed the little real solidity of the edifice.[73]
When the measures of Count Aranda deprived Paraguay of its pious and skilful civilizers, the sad truth appeared in complete light. The Guaranis, deprived of their spiritual guides, refused all confidence in the lay directors sent them by the Spanish crown. They showed no attachment to their new institutions. Their taste for savage life revived, and at present there are but thirty-seven little villages still vegetating on the banks of the Parana, the Paraguay, and Uraguay, and these contain a considerable nucleus of half-breed population. The rest have returned to the forest, and live there in as savage a state as the western tribes of the same stock, the Guaranis and Cirionos. I will not say that the deserters have readopted their ancient manners completely, but there is little trace left of the pious missionaries' labors, and this because it is given to no human race to be oblivious of its instincts, nor to abandon the path in which the Creator has placed them.
It may be supposed, had the Jesuits continued to direct their missions in Paraguay, that their efforts, assisted by time, would have been crowned with better success. I am willing to concede this, but on one condition only, always the same: that a group of Europeans would gradually have settled in the country under the protection of the Jesuit directors. These would have modified, and finally completely transformed the native blood, and a state would have been formed, bearing probably an aboriginal name, whose inhabitants might have prided themselves upon descending from autochthonic ancestors, though as completely belonging to Europe as the institutions by which they might be governed.
CHAPTER VI.
THIS DIVERSITY IS NOT THE RESULT OF GEOGRAPHICAL SITUATION.