Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/66

 Audience was established in 1783, and thus it became independent of Ch areas (Chuquivaca) where the high Court dated from 1559.

The first Viceroy of the Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, appointed March 21, 1778_, was Lieutenant- General D. Pedro de Zeballos. This officer was at once Captain- General with command of army, fleet, and church, and with civil as well as military powers. His successors kept up considerable state; they lived pompously upon gifts, unlawful to accept; and they cared little for the orders which forbad them to trade, to borrow, or to lend money; to marry without permission, to become sponsors, officially to attend marriages or funerals, to have intimate friends, or even to possess land. The Viceroys were removable at will; and, at the end of their term, each was expected before he went home, to justify his acts before a Tribunal de Residencia. The latter was held for sixty to ninety days by a doctor of laws, whom the King chose out of three nominees, proposed to him by the Council of the Indies. This was some check upon a bad man; otherwise, as a Viceroy himself said, the Viceroy could be " more sovereign than the Grand Turk." At first, the locum tenens, during the absence of the King's representative, was the Rejente, or senior Oidor, the Auditor-judge of the Supreme Court (Audiencia). In the latter days of colonial rule, the senior military authority claimed the place, and thus in the revolutionary times and to the present age, Spanish America, it may be remarked, has ever preferred the rule of generals.

Meanwhile, the province of Paraguay, here the cradle of Spanish colonization, that Mediterranean state, distant from the ocean and from the Platine ports affected by Europeans, isolated from the world, and deeply depressed by Jesuitic Socialism,, owed all her advantages to the suavity of the climate, the fertility of the soil, and the easy simple life which.