In Paraguay nothing is more remarkable in a market in the country than the way in which the people will not undersell each other, even refusing to part with goods a fraction lower than the price which they consider fair.[187] It may be that the Jesuits would have done better to endeavour to equip their neophytes more fully, so as to take their place in the battle of the world. It may be that the simple, happy lives they led were too opposed to the general scheme of outside human life to find acceptance or a place in our cosmogony. But one thing I am sure of—that the innocent delight of the poor Indian Alferez Real, mounted upon his horse, dressed in his motley, barefooted, and overshadowed by his gold-laced hat, was as entire as if he had eaten of all the fruits of all the trees of knowledge of his time, and so perhaps the Jesuits were wise.
Strangely enough—but, then, how strangely all extremes meet in humanity!—the Jesuits alone (at least, in Paraguay) seem to have apprehended, as the Arabs certainly have done from immemorial time, that the first duty of a man is to enjoy his life. Art, science, literature, ambition—all the frivolities with which men occupy themselves—have their due place; but life is first, and in some strange, mysterious way the Jesuits felt it, though, no doubt, they would have been the first to deny it with a thousand oaths. But in a Jesuit mission all was not feasting or processioning, for with such neighbours as the Mamelucos they had to keep themselves prepared.[188] As for their better government in home affairs each mission had its police, with officers[189] chosen by the Jesuits amongst the Indians, so for exterior defence they had militia, and in it the caciques[190] of the different tribes held principal command. Most likely over them, or at their elbows, were set priests who before entering the Company of Jesus had been soldiers: for there were many such amongst the Jesuits. As their own founder once had been a soldier, so the Company was popular amongst those soldiers who from some cause or other had changed their swords to crucifixes, and taken service in the ranks of Christ.[191] As it was most important, both for defence and policy, to keep the caciques content, they were distinguished by better treatment than the others in many different ways. Their food was more abundant, and a guard of Indians was on perpetual duty round the houses where they lived; these they employed as servants and as messengers to summon distant companies of Indians to the field. Their method of organization must have been like that of the Boers or of the Arabs; for every Indian belonged to a company, which now and then was brought together for evolutions in the field or for a period of training, after the fashion of our militia or the German Landwehr. Perhaps this system of an armed militia, always ready for the field, was what, above all other reasons, enabled their detractors to represent the Jesuits as feared and unpopular. Why, it was asked, does this community of priests maintain an army in its territories? No one remembered that if such were not the case the missions could not have existed for a year without a force to defend their borders from the Paulistas. Everyone forgot that Fathers Montoya and Del Taño had obtained special permission from the King for the Indians of the missions to bear arms; and, as no human being is grateful for anything but contumelious treatment, the Spanish settlers conveniently forgot how many times a Jesuit army had saved their territories. The body of three thousand Guaranís sent at the expense of the Company to assist the Spaniards against the Portuguese at the attack upon the Colonia del Sacramento[192] on the river Plate, in 1678, was quite forgotten, together with the innumerable contingents sent by the Jesuits at the demand of Spanish governors against the Chaco Indians, the Payaguás, and even against the distant Calchaquis, in what is now the province of Jujuy. Even when an English pirate, called in the Spanish histories Roque Barloque (explained by some to be plain Richard Barlow), appeared off Buenos Ayres, the undaunted neophytes shrank not a moment from going to the assistance of their co-religionists against the ‘Lutheran dog’.[193] Lastly, all Spanish governors and writers, both contemporaneous and at the end of the eighteenth century, seem to forget that if the Jesuits had an army of neophytes within their territory the fact was known and approved of at the court of Spain.[194] But it appears that Calvin had many coadjutors in his policy of ‘Jesuitas aut necandi aut calumniis opponendi sunt.’[195] When a Jesuit army took the field, driving before it sufficient cattle to subsist upon, and with its caballada of spare horses upon its flank, it must have resembled many a Gaucho army I have seen in Entre Rios five-and-twenty years ago. The only difference seems to have been that the Gauchos of yesterday did not use bows and arrows, although they might have done so with as much benefit to themselves, and no more danger to their enemies, than was occasioned by the rusty, ill-conditioned guns they used to bear. The Indians were armed with bows, and in their expeditions each Indian carried one hundred and fifty arrows tipped with iron. Others had firearms, but all bore bolas on their saddles, and carried lazos and long lances,[196] which, like the Pampa Indians, they used in mounting their horses, placing one hand upon the mane, and vaulting into the saddles with the other leaning on the lance. The infantry were armed with lances and a few guns; they also carried bolas, but they trusted most to slings, for which they carried bags of hide, with a provision of smooth round stones, and used them dexterously. On several occasions their rude militia gave proofs of stubborn valour, and, as they fought under the Jesuits’ eyes, no doubt acquitted themselves as men would who looked upon their priests almost in the light of gods. But agriculture and cattle-breeding were not all the resources of the missions; for the Jesuits engaged in commerce largely, both with the outer world and by the intricate and curious barter system which they had set on foot for the mutual convenience of the different mission towns. In many of the inventories printed by Brabo, one comes across the entry ‘Deudas’, showing a sort of account current between the towns for various articles. Thus, they exchanged cattle for cotton, sugar for rice, wheat for pig-iron or tools from Europe; as no account of interest ever appears in any inventory as between town and town, it seems the Jesuits anticipated Socialism—at least, so far as that they bought and sold for use, and not for gain. Although between the towns of their own territory all was arranged for mutual convenience, yet in their dealings with the outside world the Jesuits adhered to what are known as ‘business principles’. These principles, if I mistake not, have been deified by politicians with their ‘Buy in the cheapest, sell in the dearest’ tag, and therefore even the sternest Protestant or Jansenist (if such there still exist) can have no stone to throw at the Company of Jesus for its participation in that system which has made the whole world glad.
Cotton and linen cloth, tobacco, hides, woods of the various hard-wood forests of the country, and, above all, yerba-maté, were their chief articles of export to the outside world. Their nearest market was in Buenos Ayres, and to that port they sent their yerba in boats made at their own yards, of which they had several, but notably at Yapeyú upon the Uruguay. The money that was made was sent to the Superior of the missions, who had the disposition of the way in which it was dispensed, either for use at home or to be sent to Europe for necessary goods. As well as yerba-maté, they sent great quantities of hides. The inventories of the towns taken at the expulsion state that the number of green hides[197] exported annually was fifty thousand, together with six thousand cured; in addition they sold from three to four arrobas[198] of horse-hair, and wood to the value of twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars every year. The total export of their yerba ranged between eighty and one hundred thousand arrobas, which at the lowest price could not have been sold at a profit under seven dollars an arroba,[199] so that the income[200] of the thirty towns must have been relatively large.[201] Two or three hundred barrels of honey[202] and some three or four thousand arrobas of tobacco made up the sum total of their exports, though, had they needed money, it might have been increased in such a country, and with so many willing labourers, almost indefinitely.
Thus it will be seen that the missions were organized both agriculturally and commercially so as to be almost self-supporting, and that of the mere necessaries of life they had sufficient for exportation, no small achievement when we consider how averse from labour were the Indians with whom they had to deal. But that nothing should be wanting that a civilized community could possibly desire, they had their prisons, with good store of chains, fetters, whips, and all the other instruments with which the moral code is generally enforced. The most usual punishment was whipping;[203] and the crimes most frequent were drunkenness, neglect of work, and bigamy, which latter lapse from virtue the Jesuits chastised severely, not thinking, being celibates themselves, that not unlikely it was apt to turn into its own punishment without the aid of stripes.
Chapter VII
Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits of the priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to slavery—Their system of administration
Much has been written of the interior government of the missions by the Jesuits, but chiefly by strong partisans, for and against, on either side, whose only object was to make out a case to fit the prejudices of those for whom they wrote. Upon the Jesuit side the Abbé Muratori[204] describes a paradise. A very Carlo Dolce amongst writers, with him all in the missions is so cloying sweet that one’s soul sickens, and one longs in his ‘Happy Christianity’ to find a drop of gall. But for five hundred pages nothing is amiss; the men of Belial persecute the Jesuit saints, who always (after the fashion of their Order and mankind) turn both cheeks to the smiter, and, if their purse is taken, hasten to give up their cloaks. The Indians are all love and gratitude. No need in the Abbé’s pages for the twelve pair of fetters, which Brabo most unkindly has set down amongst his inventories. Never a single lapsus from the moral rule the Jesuits imposed—no drunkenness, and bigamy so seldom met with that it would seem that Joseph Andrews had been a swaggerer judged by the standard of these moral Guaranís. Then comes Ibañez,[205] the ex-Jesuit, on the other side. In a twinkling of an eye the scene is changed. For, quite in Hogarth’s vein, he paints the missions as a perpetual march to Finchley, and tells us that the Indians were savages, and quite unchanged in all their primitive propensities under the Jesuit rule. And for the Jesuits themselves he has a few home-truths administered with vinegar, after the fashion of the renegade the whole world over, who sees nothing good in the society that has turned him out. He roundly says the Jesuits were loafers, accuses them of keeping the Indians ignorant for their own purposes, and paints them quite as black as the Abbé Muratori painted them rose colour, and with as little art. So that, as usually happens in the writings of all polemists, no matter upon which side they may write, but little information, and that distorted to an incredible degree, is all that they afford.
In general, curious as it may appear, the bitterest opponents of the Jesuits were Catholics, and Protestants have often written as apologists. Buffon, Raynal, and Montesquieu, with Voltaire, Robertson, and Southey, have written favourably of the internal government of the missions and the effect which it produced. No other names of equal authority can be quoted on the other side; but yet the fact remains that the Jesuits in Paraguay were exposed to constant calumny from the first day they went there till the last member of the Order left the land.
It is my object first to try to show what the conditions of their government really were, and then to try and clear up what was the cause of unpopularity, and why so many and such persistent calumnies were laid to their account. Stretching right up and down the banks of both the Paraná and Uruguay, the missions extended from Nuestra Senora de Fé[206] (or Santa Maria), in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul; and from the mission of Corpus, on the east bank of the Paraná, to Yapeyú, upon the Uruguay. The official capital was placed at Candelaria, on the east bank of the Paraná. In that town the Superior of the missions had his official residence, and from thence he ruled the whole territory, having not only the ecclesiastical but the temporal power, the latter, from the position in which he was placed, so many hundred miles from any Spanish Governor, having by degrees gradually come into his hands. The little town of La Candelaria was, when I knew it, in a most neglected state. The buildings of the Jesuits, with the exception of the church, were all in ruins. The streets were sandy and deserted, the foot-walk separated from them by a line of hard-wood posts, which, as tradition said, were left there by the Jesuits; but the hard woods of Paraguay are almost as imperishable as iron.
A balsa—that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable—plied fitfully across the Paraná to Ytapua, also a little ex-Jesuit town upon the other side. Each shop had a sign outside, as was the case in England a hundred years ago. Indians supplied the place with vegetables, floating down in canoes piled up with fruit, with flowers, with sweet potatoes, and returning home empty, or for their cargo three or four tin pails, a looking-glass, or other of the marvels which Europe sends as a sample of her manufactures to little frontier towns. All was as quiet, or perhaps much quieter than in the time when the Superior of the Jesuits was in residence, and if it had been necessary, during the hot hours of noon, Godivas by the dozen might have ridden down the streets, had they been able to find horses quiet enough to ride, certain that no one in the town would lose his after-breakfast nap to look at them.