Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/58

 God-elected race, and delighted to be so patriarchally and caciqually ruled, prostrated themselves before the Fathers in body and mind; looked up to them as dog does to man, and bound up in them their own physical as well as spiritual existence.

The Superior of the Missions being empowered by the Pope to confirm, bishops were not wanted. That high official usually resided at Candelaria, on the left bank of the upper Parana River. In each of the reduced villages was a "College" for two Jesuits—misite illos binos, the practice of the earliest Christian Apostles, was with them a rule as in Japan and Dahome. One charged with temporals was the Rector, Misionero, Cmxta or Curate; the other, called Doctrinero or Companero, the Vice-Curate, managed spiritual matters. Each settlement also had its Cabildo or municipality, composed of a Corregidor, an Alcalde (magistrate) and his assessors; but as in the native corps of the Anglo-Indian army, these were native officers under command of the white strangers. The Fathers also decided, without appeal to the ordinary judges or to the Spanish tribunals, all cases civil and criminal; the only rule or law was the Jesuit's will, and the punishments were inflicted through the Cabildos over which they presided. Presently the royal tithes and taxes were replaced by a fixed levy in order to avoid communication with the agent at the head-quarters of civil power.

A system of complete uniformity was extended even to the plan of the settlement and of the houses. Travellers in the Missions have deemed themselves victims of delusion when after riding many leagues from one Reduction they found themselves in a fac-simile of that which they had left. All the settlements had, like the settlers, saints' names. The normal plan was a heap of pauper huts clustering about a church of the utmost procurable magnificence, and