Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/76



46 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

state of his relations with the Conterminal States, especially with Buenos Aires, which could at any time have closed his only line of importation, he was eager to lay in that formidable store of arms and ammunition and military appa- ratus, which still accumulated by a second generation, have lasted through a five years, war. Finally he was steel- cased at all points, and ever ready to fight ; hence, I presume, we even now read of the "peaceful little Republic, Paraguay."*

With regard to the Church he evidently thought with the great Mii'abeau, " Yous ne ferez jamais rien de la Revo- lution si vous ne la dechristianisez pas." * He abolished the Inquisition ; he did away with the onerous diezmo or tithes ; he converted the idle monasteries into barracks, and he secularized the valuable gold and silver plate, the doubloons and the other property which lay useless in and around the religious houses and the Misiones. He shaved the heads of oflPending monks " in order to take the glory from their crowns."'^ He wished to be a Catholic, not a Roman Catholic. One of his favourite sayings was — ^' You see what priests are good for ; they make us believe more in the devil than in God." Again he would remark, pro- bably imitating the greatest Corsican, " Be Christians, Jews, or Mussulmans, anything but Atheists."^ The saying was latitudinarian in his day, before Anti-Theism had taken the place of Atheism. Finding that the Bishop of Asun- cion had fallen into a manner of aberration, the result of age and mental sufi'ering. Dictator Francia, determined to be governor spiritual as well as temporal, made him depute his powers to Pai Montiel, " Provisor'^ or Yicar- General. Through the latter he ruled the diocese, and made the Church the handmaid, as she should be, not the mistress of the State ; the moral Police, not the Sovereign. He suppressed night worship and processions, because they certainly led to dis-