[180] Furnished to Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the expulsion, and first printed by Brabo (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’).
[181] The Jesuits exercised the Indians a great deal in dancing, taking advantage of their love of dancing in their savage state. D’Orbigny and Demersay (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’, and ‘Histoire Physique, etc., du Paraguay’) found between the years 1830 and 1855 that the Indians of the Moxos and Chiquitos still danced as they had done in the time of the Jesuits.
I have seen them in the then (1873) almost deserted mission of Jesus, buried in the great woods on the shore of the Paraná, dance a strange, half-savage dance outside the ruined church.
[182] Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 239, says: ‘Todos los pueblos ponen su castillo en la plaza y en el medio de el colocan el retratro del Rey, y el Indio Alferez Real . . . va al castillo con el Estandarte Real y alli hace su homenage con otros rendimientos anteel Retratro Real,’ saying in Guaraní, ‘Toicohengatú ñande Mbaru bicha guazú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey marangatú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey Fernando Sesto!’ (‘Long live our King, the great chief! Long live our good King! Long live our King Ferdinand VI.’).
[183] ‘Chupas de damasco carmesi con encajes de plata.’
[184] It may be roughly translated, ‘a good stone wall between a male and female saint.’
[185] These clothes were the property of the community, and not of the individual Indians.
[186] Brabo, xxxv., Introduction to ‘Los inventarios de los bienes.’
[187] A recent writer in the little journal published on yellow packing-paper in the Socialist colony of Cosme, in Paraguay (Cosme Monthly, November, 1898), has a curious passage corroborating what I have so often observed myself. Under the heading of ‘A Paraguayan Market’, he says: ‘The Guaraní clings stubbornly to the Guaraní customs. This is irritating to the European, but who shall say that the Guaraní is not right? . . . European settlement cannot but be fatal to the Guaraní, however profitable it may be to land-owning and mercantile classes. . . . The Paraguayan market is a woman’s club . . . they will come thirty or forty miles with a clothful of the white curd-cheese of the country, contentedly journeying on foot along the narrow paths. They will cut a cabbage into sixteenths and eat their cheese themselves rather than sell it under market price.’ Long may they do so, for so long will they be free, and perhaps poor; but, then, in countries such as Paraguay freedom and poverty are identical.
[188] As the Gaucho proverb says, ‘Las armas son necesarias pero “naide” sabe cuando.’