A Vanished Arcadia | Page 5

though they spoke at secondhand,
repeating but the stories they had heard in youth, kept the illusion that
the missions in the Jesuits' time had been a paradise. Into the matter of
the Jesuits' motives I do not propose to enter, holding that the origin of
motives is too deeply seated to be worth inquiry until one has more
information about the human mind than even modern `scientists' seem
able to impart. Yet it is certain the Jesuits in Paraguay had faith fit to
remove all mountains, as the brief stories of their lives, so often ending
with a rude field-cross by the corner of some forest, and the inscription
`hic occissus est' survive to show. Some men -- such is the complexity
of human nature -- have undergone trials and persecutions for base
motives, and it is open for anyone to say the Jesuits, as they were
Jesuits, could do nothing good. Still, I believe that Father Ruiz
Montoya -- whose story I have told, how falteringly, and with how little
justice to his greatness, none knows better than myself -- was a good
man -- that is, a man without ulterior motives, and actuated but by his
love to the poor Indians with whom he passed his life. To-day, when no
one can see good in anything or anybody outside the somewhat beefy
pale of the Anglo-Saxon race, I do not hope that such a mere dabbler in
the great mystery of history as I am myself will for an instant change
one preconceived opinion; for I am well aware that speeches based on
facts are impotent in popular assemblies to change a single vote.
It is an article of Anglo-Saxon faith that all the Spanish colonies were
mal-administered, and all the Spanish conquerors bloodthirsty butchers,
whose sole delight was blood. This, too, from the members of a race
who . . .; but `In the multitude of the greyhounds is the undoing of the
hare.' Therefore, I ask those who imagine that all Spaniards at the
conquest of America were ruffians, to consider the career of Alvar
Nunez, who also struts through his brief chapter in the pages of my
most imperfect book. Still, I admit men of the stamp of Alvar Nunez
are most rare, and were still rarer in the sixteenth century; and to find
many of the Ruiz Montoya brand, Diogenes would have needed a
lantern fitted with electric light. In the great controversy which engaged
the pens of many of the best writers of the world last century, after the
Jesuits were expelled from Spain and her colonial possessions (then
almost half the world), it will be found that amongst all the mud so

freely flung about, the insults given and received, hardly anyone but a
few ex-Jesuits had any harm to say of the doings of the Order during its
long rule in Paraguay. None of the Jesuits were ever tried; no crimes
were charged against them; even the reasons for their expulsion were
never given to the world at large. Certain it is that but a few years after
their final exit from the missions between the Uruguay and Parana all
was confusion. In twenty years most of the missions were deserted, and
before thirty years had passed no vestige of their old prosperity
remained.
The semi-communism which the Jesuits had introduced was swept
away, and the keen light of free and vivifying competition (which beats
so fiercely upon the bagman's paradise of the economists) reigned in its
stead. The revenues declined,* all was corruption, and, as the Governor,
Don Juan Jose Vertiz, writes to the Viceroy,** the secular priests sent
by the Government were brawlers, drunkards, and strikers, carrying
arms beneath their cloaks; that robbery was rife; and that the Indians
daily deserted and returned by hundreds to the woods.
-- * Dean Funes, `Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay', etc.,
Buenos Aires, 1816. ** Idem. The letter is dated 1771 and the Jesuits
were expelled in 1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an
official position, and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the
expeller of the Jesuits, his testimony would seem to be as valuable as
that of the ablest theorist on government, Catholic or Protestant, who
ever wrote. --
All the reports of riches amassed in Paraguay by the Jesuits, after the
expulsion of their order proved to be untrue; nothing of any
consequence was found in any of the towns, although the Jesuits had
had no warning of their expulsion, and had no time for preparation or
for concealment of their gold. Although they stood to the Indians
almost in the light of gods, and had control of an armed force larger by
far than any which the temporal