thought myself. Although I made no notes of anything, caring most chiefly for the condition of my horse, yet when I think on them, pampa and cordillera, virgin forest, the `passes' of the rivers, approached by sandy paths, bordered by flowering and sweet-smelling trees, and most of all the deserted Jesuit Missions, half buried by the vigorous vegetation, and peopled but by a few white-clad Indians, rise up so clearly that, without the smallest faculty for dealing with that which I have undertaken, I am forced to write. Flowers, scents, the herds of horses, the ostriches, and the whole charm of that New World which those who saw it even a quarter of a century ago saw little altered from the remotest times, have remained clear and sharp, and will remain so with me to the end. So to the readers (if I chance to have them) of this short attempt to give some faint idea of the great Christian Commonwealth of the Jesuit Missions between the Paraná and Uruguay, I now address myself. He who attacks a subject quite fallen out of date, and still not old enough to give a man authority to speak upon it without the fear of contradiction, runs grave risk.

Gentle, indulgent reader, if so be that you exist in these the days of universal knowledge and self-sufficient criticism, I do not ask for your indulgence for the many errors which no doubt have slipped into this work. These, if you care to take the trouble, you can verify, and hold me up to shame. What I do crave is that you will approach the subject with an open mind. Your Jesuit is, as we know, the most tremendous wild-fowl that the world has known. `La guardia nera' of the Pope, the order which has wrought so much destruction, the inventors of `Ciencia media',[1] cradle from which has issued forth Molina, Suarez, and all those villains who, in the days in which the doctrine was unfashionable, decried mere faith, and took their stand on works — who in this land of preconceived opinion can spare it a good word? But, notwithstanding, even a Jansenist, if such be left, must yet admit the claim of Francis Xavier as a true, humble saint, and if the sour-faced sectary of Port Royale should refuse, all men of letters must perforce revere the writer of the hymn.

But into the whole question of the Jesuits I cannot enter, as it entails command of far more foot and half-foot words than I can muster up. Still, in America, and most of all in Paraguay, I hope to show the Order did much good, and worked amongst the Indians like apostles, receiving an apostle's true reward of calumny, of stripes, of blows, and journeying hungry, athirst, on foot, in perils oft, from the great cataract of the Paraná to the recesses of the Tarumensian woods. Little enough I personally care for the political aspect of their commonwealth, or how it acted on the Spanish settlements; of whether or not it turned out profitable to the Court of Spain, or if the crimes and charges of ambition laid to the Jesuits' account were false or true. My only interest in the matter is how the Jesuits' rule acted upon the Indians themselves, and if it made them happy — more happy or less happy than those Indians who were directly ruled from Spain, or through the Spanish Governors of the viceroyalties. For theories of advancement, and as to whether certain arbitrary ideas of the rights of man, evolved in general by those who in their persons and their lives are the negation of all rights, I give a fico — yes, your fig of Spain — caring as little as did ancient Pistol for `palabras', and holding that the best right that a man can have is to be happy after the way that pleases him the most. And that the Jesuits rendered the Indians happy is certain, though to those men who fudge a theory of mankind, thinking that everyone is forged upon their anvil, or run out of their own mould, after the fashion of a tallow dip (a theory which, indeed, the sameness of mankind renders at times not quite untenable), it seems absurd because the progress of the world has gone on other lines — lines which prolonged indefinitely would never meet those which the Jesuits drew. All that I know is I myself, in the deserted missions, five-and-twenty years ago often have met old men who spoke regretfully of Jesuit times, who cherished all the customs left by the company, and 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 Nuñez, who also struts through his brief chapter in the pages of my most imperfect book. Still, I admit men of the stamp of Alvar Nuñez 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 Paraná 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,[2] all was corruption, and, as the Governor, Don Juan José Vertiz, writes to the Viceroy,