Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/59

 the establishments of the Fathers were in the church, not in the hut. The Jesuits were forbidden to converse singly with women or to receive them in their home; but Jose Basilio da Gama and their other adversaries declare that most of them had concubines and families.

The community was a mere phalanstery. The Guaranis were taught by their Fathers to hear and to obey like schoolboys, and their lives were divided between the chapel and farm work. Their tasks were changed by Jesuit art into a kind of religious rejoicing, a childish opera. They marched afield to the sound of fiddles, following a procession that bore upon the Anda or platform a figure of the ; this was placed under an arbour, whilst the hoe was plied to the voice of psalmody, and the return to rest was as solemn and musical as the going forth to toil. This system is in fact that of the Central African Negro—I have described the merrymakings which accompany the tilling of Unyamwezi and the harvest-home of Galla-land. The crops of yerba and tobacco, dry pulse and cotton, cut with the same ceremony, were stored with hides, timber, and coarse hand-woven stuff's, in public garners under the direction of the Padres. After feeding and clothing his lieges. King Jesuit exported the remains of the common stock in his own boats, and exchanged it at Buenos Aires for the general wants—hardware, drugs, looms, agricultural implements, fine clothes to be given as prizes, and splendid stuff's and ornaments for the Chm-ch. No Guarani could buy or sell; he was, however, graciously permitted to change one kind of food for another. Feminine work was submitted to the same rule as masculine, and "Dii laboribus omnia vendunt" became strictly true, but only of the priestly purchasers.

In some Missions the toil was constant and severe, indeed so much so as to crush out the spirit of the