Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/63

 the bold Brazilian Paulistas, the " sinful and miserable"

Paulitians or Paulopolitans, whom Muratori attacks with the extreme of odium theologicum. I may here remark that no movement has been more systematically maligned and misrepresented, than the hostilities carried on between the years 1620 and 1640 by the people of S. Paulo. They had justly expelled from their young city the meddling and greedy Jesuits; and the employes of the society, Charlevoix, for instance, happened at this time to have the ear of Europe. The quarrel was purely political. The Spanish Crown, which had absorbed Portugal in 1580, was encroaching rapidly through its propagandists, as does Russia in High Asia, upon the territory claimed by and belonging to the Paulistas; and the latter, who in that matter were true patriots, determined to hold their country's own with the sword. I do not wonder to see half-read men like Wilcocke (p. 286) and Mansfield (p. 441) led wrong by the heroic assurance of the Jesuit historians; but the accurate Southey, a helluo librorum, ought certainly to have known better. Working, however, the Mameluco invasion, the Company of Jesus managed to form under the sway of its General an imperium in imperio, which in 1750 could resist the several campaigns directed against it by the united arms of the Brazil, of Buenos Aires, and of Montevideo. We may still learn something from their military regulations; for instance, from the order of Father Michoni, "The children ought also to be drilled, and to undergo review."

It is interesting to see in the present year the same disposition—offensive and defensive, the individual superiority of the descendants of Sépé and Cacámbo, and the leadership of one more terrible than the terrible Father Balda.