Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/61

 taught them to read, to recite the Doctrina Christiana in Guarani, and to study certain books of piety. The people were forbidden to learn Spanish; and when the Inquisition put "a l'index" poor Robinson Crusoe (1790), doubtless because he managed to live so long without the aid of a ghostly father, we may imagine what must have been the Jesuitical succedaneum for education. To educate is to enfranchise, to enfranchise is to disestablish, or rather to disendow. We in England at least understand that, otherwise we should long ago have made education compulsory, gratuitous, secular, universal.

The Jesuits established their system by the means most efficacious amongst savages, the grasp of the velvet-gloved iron hand. Their prime object was complete isolation, to draw a cordon between the Missions and the outer world; even communication between the "Indians" of the several Reductions was rarely allowed. It succeeded, this deadening, brutalizing religious despotism, amongst the humble settled Guaranis who were eager to be tyrannized over, and the tree planted by the hand of St. Ignatius began to bear its legitimate fruit in 1864. I need hardly say that the fruit is the utter extinction of the race, which the progress of mankind is sweeping from the face of the earth. When tried amongst the fiercer and more warlike nomads of the Gran Chaco the system was an utter failure. The Guaranis themselves made, as might be expected, so little progress in civil life that after the expulsion of the Fathers they found self-government impossible, and Sint ut sunt aut non sint, seems to have been the clerical axiom. It was deemed necessary to organize under the Dominicans an imitative Jesuitism. The converts speedily relapsed into their pristine barbarism, and many of them flying the settlements returned to their woods and swamps.

The Missions of Paraguay have often been described—of