more comfortable mode of life, to which he adds a faith sufficient to move the Cordillera of the Andes, but at the same time restricted by a common-sense and veracity not always observable in religious writers, render Dobrizhoffer a personal friend after the perusal of his writings.

English is singularly barren in regard to the Jesuits in Paraguay. Father Falconer, an English Jesuit, has left a curious and interesting book (printed at Hereford in 1774), but he treats exclusively of what is now the province of Buenos Ayres, the Falkland Islands, and of Patagonia. As an Englishman and a Jesuit (a somewhat rare combination in the eighteenth century), and as one who doubtless knew many of the Paraguayan priests, his testimony would have been most important, especially as he was a man of great information, much education, an intrepid traveller, and, moreover, only entered the Company of Jesus at a comparatively advanced age.

It is in Spanish, or in Latin by Spanish authors, that the greater portion of the contemporary histories and accounts are to be found.[8] Literatures, like other things, have their times of fashion. At one time a knowledge of Spanish was as requisite as some tincture of French is at present, and almost as universal. Men from Germany, England, and Holland who met in a foreign country communicated in that language. In the early portion of the century Ticknor, Prescott, and Washington Irving rendered Spanish literature fashionable to some degree.

Later the historical researches of Sir William Stirling Maxwell drew some attention to it. To-day hardly any literature of Europe is so little studied in England. Still leaving apart the purely literary treasures of the language, it is in Spanish, and almost alone in Spanish, that the early history of America is to be found.

After the struggle for independence which finished about 1825, some interest was excited in the Spanish-American countries, stimulated by the writings of Humboldt; but when it became apparent that on the whole those countries could never be occupied by Northern Europeans, interest in them died out except for purposes connected with the Stock Exchange. Yet there is a charm which attaches to them which attaches to no other countries in the world. It was there that one of the greatest dramas, and certainly the greatest adventure in which the human race has engaged, took place. What Africa has been for the last twenty years, Spanish America was three hundred years ago, the difference being that, whereas modern adventure in Africa goes on under full observation, and deals in the main with absolutely uncivilized peoples, the conquest of South America was invested with all the charm of novelty, and brought the conquerors into contact with at least two peoples almost as advanced in most of the arts of civilization as they were themselves.

When first Sebastian Cabot and Solis ascended the Paraná, they found that the Guaranís of Paraguay had extended in no instance to the western shore of either of those rivers. The western banks were inhabited then, as now, by the wandering Indians of the still not entirely explored territory of the Gran Chaco. Chaco[9] is a Quichua Indian word meaning `hunting' or `hunting-ground', and it is said that after the conquest of Peru the Indian tribes which had been recently subjugated by the Incas took refuge in this huge domain of forest and of swamp.

Be that as it may, the Chaco Indians of to-day, comprising the remnants of the Lulis, Tobas, Lenguas, Mocobiós, and others, are almost as savage as when first we hear of them in the pages of Alvar Nuñez and Hulderico Schmidel. These tribes the Jesuits on many occasions attempted to civilize, but almost entirely without success, as the long record of the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries in the Chaco proves, as well as the gradual abandonment of their missions there, towards the second half of the eighteenth century.

Certain it is that at various places in the Chaco, in the quaint old maps the Jesuits have left us, one reads `Mission de Santa Cruz de los Vilelas', `Mission de la Concepcion de los Frontones', and others; but much more frequently their maps are studded with crosses, and some such legend as `Hic occisi sunt PP. Antonius Salinus et Petrus Ortiz Zarate'.[10] It was only when the Jesuits encountered the more peaceful Guaranís that they met with real success.

What was the nature of their success, how durable it was, what were the reasons which caused the expulsion of the order from America, and especially from Paraguay, and what has been the result upon the remainder of the Indians, it is my object to endeavour to explain.

A long residence in the river Plate, together with two visits to Paraguay, in one of which I saw almost all the remnants of the Paraguayan missions and a few of those situated in the province of Corrientes, and in the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul, have given me some personal acquaintance with the subject.[11]

The actual condition of the rich district of Misiones (Paraguay) at the time I visited it, shortly after the conclusion of the great war between Paraguay and Brazil in 1870, does not enable me to speak with authority on the condition of communities, the guiding spirits of which were expelled as far back as the year 1767. The actual buildings of the missions, the churches in a dismantled state, have indeed survived; in many instances the tall date-palms the Jesuits planted still wave over them. Generally the college was occupied by the Indian Alcalde, who came out to meet the visitor on a horse if he possessed one, with as much silver about the bridle and stirrups as he could afford, clothed in white, with a cloak of red baize, a large jipi-japa hat, and silver spurs buckled on his naked feet. If he had never left the mission, he talked with wonder and respect of the times of the Jesuits, and at the oracion knelt down to pray wherever the sound of the angelus might catch him. His children before bedtime knelt all in a row to ask his blessing. If he had been to Asuncion, he probably remarked that the people under those accursed priests were naught but animals and slaves, and launched into some disquisition he had heard in the solitary café which Asuncion then boasted. In the latter case, after much of the rights of man and the duties of hospitality, he generally presented you with a heavy bill for Indian corn and pindo[12] which your horse had eaten. In the former, usually he bade you go with God, and, if you spoke of payment, said: `Well, send me a book of Hours when you get to Asuncion.'

Of Indians, hardly any were left to judge of, for in the villages in which, according to the reports furnished to Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits, the population numbered in the thirty towns of the missions one hundred and twenty thousand,[13] a population of at most twenty thousand was to be found. On every side the powerful vegetation had covered up the fields. On ruined church and chapel, and on broken tower, the lianas climbed as if on trees, creeping up the