Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/57

 landed property was mulcted in impositions known as Capellanías. Its nunneries were equally wealthy, and most of them admitted only ladies of Spanish origin, thus fostering 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 isolation which afterwards gave to Paraguay the titles of Japan and "Chine Americaine." Then began the sterile, extravagant 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 obedience, 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 corvées 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