Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits
of the priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to
slavery—Their system of administration
Much has been written of the interior government of the missions by the
Jesuits, but chiefly by strong partisans, for and against, on either
side, whose only object was to make out a case to fit the prejudices of
those for whom they wrote. Upon the Jesuit side the Abbé Muratori[204]
describes a paradise. A very Carlo Dolce amongst writers, with him all
in the missions is so cloying sweet that one’s soul sickens, and one
longs in his ‘Happy Christianity’ to find a drop of gall. But for five
hundred pages nothing is amiss; the men of Belial persecute the Jesuit
saints, who always (after the fashion of their Order and mankind) turn
both cheeks to the smiter, and, if their purse is taken, hasten to give
up their cloaks. The Indians are all love and gratitude. No need in the
Abbé’s pages for the twelve pair of fetters, which Brabo most unkindly
has set down amongst his inventories. Never a single _lapsus_ from the
moral rule the Jesuits imposed—no drunkenness, and bigamy so seldom met
with that it would seem that Joseph Andrews had been a swaggerer judged
by the standard of these moral Guaranís. Then comes Ibañez,[205] the
ex-Jesuit, on the other side. In a twinkling of an eye the scene is
changed. For, quite in Hogarth’s vein, he paints the missions as a
perpetual march to Finchley, and tells us that the Indians were
savages, and quite unchanged in all their primitive propensities under
the Jesuit rule. And for the Jesuits themselves he has a few
home-truths administered with vinegar, after the fashion of the
renegade the whole world over, who sees nothing good in the society
that has turned him out. He roundly says the Jesuits were loafers,
accuses them of keeping the Indians ignorant for their own purposes,
and paints them quite as black as the Abbé Muratori painted them rose
colour, and with as little art. So that, as usually happens in the
writings of all polemists, no matter upon which side they may write,
but little information, and that distorted to an incredible degree, is
all that they afford.
In general, curious as it may appear, the bitterest opponents of the
Jesuits were Catholics, and Protestants have often written as
apologists. Buffon, Raynal, and Montesquieu, with Voltaire, Robertson,
and Southey, have written favourably of the internal government of the
missions and the effect which it produced. No other names of equal
authority can be quoted on the other side; but yet the fact remains
that the Jesuits in Paraguay were exposed to constant calumny from the
first day they went there till the last member of the Order left the
land.
It is my object first to try to show what the conditions of their
government really were, and then to try and clear up what was the cause
of unpopularity, and why so many and such persistent calumnies were
laid to their account. Stretching right up and down the banks of both
the Paraná and Uruguay, the missions extended from Nuestra Senora de
Fé[206] (or Santa Maria), in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now
the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul; and from the mission of
Corpus, on the east bank of the Paraná, to Yapeyú, upon the Uruguay.
The official capital was placed at Candelaria, on the east bank of the
Paraná. In that town the Superior of the missions had his official
residence, and from thence he ruled the whole territory, having not
only the ecclesiastical but the temporal power, the latter, from the
position in which he was placed, so many hundred miles from any Spanish
Governor, having by degrees gradually come into his hands. The little
town of La Candelaria was, when I knew it, in a most neglected state.
The buildings of the Jesuits, with the exception of the church, were
all in ruins. The streets were sandy and deserted, the foot-walk
separated from them by a line of hard-wood posts, which, as tradition
said, were left there by the Jesuits; but the hard woods of Paraguay
are almost as imperishable as iron.
A _balsa_—that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable—plied fitfully
across the Paraná to Ytapua, also a little ex-Jesuit town upon the
other side. Each shop had a sign outside, as was the case in England a
hundred years ago. Indians supplied the place with vegetables, floating
down in canoes piled up with fruit, with flowers, with sweet potatoes,
and returning home empty, or for their cargo three or four tin pails, a
looking-glass, or other of the marvels which Europe sends as a sample
of her manufactures to little frontier towns. All was as quiet, or
perhaps much quieter than in the time when the Superior of the Jesuits
was in residence, and if it had been necessary, during the hot hours of
noon, Godivas by the dozen might have ridden down the streets, had they
been able to find horses quiet enough to ride, certain that no one in
the town would lose his after-breakfast nap to look at them.
In every mission two chosen Jesuits lived. The elder, selected for his
experience of the country and knowledge of the tongue from amongst
those who had been rectors of colleges or provincials of the Order, was
vested with the civil power, and was responsible direct to the
Superior. The second, generally styled companion (el Compañero), acted
as his lieutenant, and had full charge of all things spiritual; so that
they were a check on one another, and their duties did not clash.
In difficulties the Superior transmitted orders, like a general in the
field, by mounted messengers, who frequently rode over a hundred miles
a day, relays of horses always being kept ready for emergencies every
three leagues upon the road.
From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the
territory, most of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks
which were the only thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to
Corrientes, to Asuncion, others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the
Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay were about eighty posts, all guarded,
and with horses ready to equip the messengers. But there were also
roads in the district of the Upper Paraná, which I myself remember as a
wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers roamed about and
Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of a
blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In
the districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and
relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in
which they carried _yerba_[207] and the other products of the land.
Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads
branching out on every side, and their relays of post-horses at
intervals, most probably no State of America at the time had such
interior means of communication with the seat of government. The Incas
and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried messages and brought up
fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the Spanish colonies
contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had fallen
into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas
used in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks
to send a letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.
The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance
democratic—that is to say, there were officials, as mayors[208] and
councillors; but most of them were named by the Jesuits, and all of
them, even although elected, owed their election entirely to their
priests. This sort of thought-suggested representation was the most
fitting for the Indians at the time,[209] and those who look into the
workings of a County Council of to-day cannot but think at times that
the majority of the councillors would have been better chosen had the
electorate had the benefit of some controlling hand, though from what
quarter it is difficult to see. The problem which most writers on the
Jesuits have quite misunderstood, is how two Jesuits were able to keep
a mission of several thousand Indians in order, and to rule supreme
without armed forces, or any means of making their power felt or of
enforcing obedience to their decrees. Undoubtedly, the dangerous
position in which the Indians stood, exposed on one side to the
Paulistas, and on the other to the Spanish settlers, both of whom
wished to take them as their slaves, placed power in the Jesuits’
hands: for the Indians clearly perceived that the Jesuits alone stood
between them and instant slavery. Most controversialists who have
opposed the Jesuits assert that the Indians of the missions were, in
reality, half slaves. Nothing is further from the truth, if one
consults the contemporary records, and remembers the small number of
the Jesuits. The work the Indians did was inconsiderable, and under
such conditions as to deprive it of much of the toilsomeness which is
incident to any kind of work. The very essence of a slave’s estate is
being obliged to work without remuneration for another man. Nothing was
farther from the Indians than such a state of things. Their work was
done for the community, and though the Jesuits, without doubt, had the
full disposition of all the money earned in commerce,[210] and of the
distribution of the goods, neither the money nor the goods were used
for self-aggrandisement, but were laid out for the benefit of the
community at large. The total population of the thirty towns is
variously estimated from one hundred and forty to one hundred and
eighty thousand,[211] and, curiously enough, it remained almost at the
same figure during the whole period of the Jesuit rule. This fact has
been adduced against the Jesuits, and it has been said that they could
not have been good rulers, or the population must have increased; but
those who say so forget that the Indians of Paraguay were never in
great numbers, and that most writers on the wild tribes, as
Dobrizhoffer[212] and Azara, remark their tendency never to increase.
All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been
seen, by a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing
of any European force, and being almost always on bad terms with the
Spanish settlers in Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made
against the enslaving of the Indians, had no means of coercion at their
command. Hence the Indians must have been contented with their rule,
for if they had not been so the Jesuits possessed no power to stop them
from returning to their savage life. Azara,[213] although in the main
an opponent of the Jesuits, in the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of
to-day would oppose anything of a Socialistic tendency, yet has this
most significant passage in their favour. After enumerating the amount
of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he says ‘en faisant le
bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque excédant, il était
en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’[214] Seldom enough does such
a result take place when the balance is struck to-day in any country
between the rulers and their ‘taxables’. Following their system of
perfect isolation from the world to its logical sequence, the Jesuits
surrounded all the territories of their different towns with walls and
ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent egress or ingress
between the missions and the outer world.[215] Much capital has been
made out of this, as it is attempted to be shown that the Indians were
thereby treated as prisoners in their own territories. Nothing,
however, has been said of the fact that, if the ditches, palisades, and
guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the effect of keeping
the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as without
reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to
talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used
but as a stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in
police-courts, when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises
his eyes to heaven, and then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his
thumb.
It will be seen that the communism of the missions was of a limited
character, and, though the land was cultivated by the labour of the
community, that the products were administered by the Jesuits alone.
Though it has been stated by many polemical writers, such as Ibañez and
Azara, and more recently by Washburne, who was American Minister in
Paraguay during the war with Brazil and the Argentine Republic
(1866-70), that the Jesuits had amassed great wealth in Paraguay, no
proof has ever been advanced for such a charge. Certainly Cardenas made
the same statement, but it was never in his power to bring any
confirmation of what he said. This power alone was in the hands of
Bucareli (1767), the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the
expulsion of the Jesuits was carried out. By several extracts from
Brabo’s inventories, and by the statement of the receivers sent by
Bucareli, I hope to show that there was no great wealth at any time in
the mission territory, and that the income was expended in the
territory itself. It may be that the expenditure on churches was
excessive, and also that the money laid out on religious ceremonies was
not productive; but the Jesuits, strange as it may appear, did not
conduct the missions after the fashion of a business concern, but
rather as the rulers of some Utopia—those foolish beings who think
happiness is preferable to wealth.
Nothing can give a better idea of the way of life of a Jesuit priest
and of his daily labours than the curious letter of Nicolas Ñeenguiru,
originally written in Guaraní, but of which a translation is extant in
the National Spanish Archives in Simancas:[216]
‘The manner of living of the father is to shut all the doors, and
remain alone with his servant and his cook (who are Indians of a
considerable age), and these only wait on him; but by day only, and at
twelve o’clock, they go out, and an old man has care of the porter’s
lodge, and it is he who shuts the gate when the father is asleep, or
when he goes out to see his cultivated ground, and even then they go
alone, except it be with an old Indian, who guides them and attends to
the (father’s) horse; and after that he goes to Mass, and in the
evening to the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, calling us together by the
sound of the bell, and before that he calls the boys and girls with a
small bell, and after that the good father begins to teach them
doctrine and how to cross themselves. In the same way, on every feast
day, he preaches to us the Word of God, in the same way the Holy
Sacrament of Penitence and of the Communion; in these things does the
good Father employ himself, and every night the porter’s lodge is
closed, and the key taken to the Father’s room, which is only opened in
the morning in order that the sacristan and the cooks may enter. . . .
‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to
their rooms, and then they take some hot water and _yerba_ (_maté_),
and nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and
then all those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he
goes out to see if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and
afterwards they go to their room to read the divine service for the day
in his book, and to pray that God may prosper him in all his affairs.
At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little, not to eat much, for he only
has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not filling a little glass;
and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in our town, except
that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which the
Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . .
. After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the
church; afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is
resting those who work in the father’s house go out, and those who do
any kind of indoor work, and also the sacristan and the cook: all these
go out, and as long as the bell does not ring the doors are shut, and
only an old man guards the gate, and when they ring the bell again he
opens the doors so that those who work indoors may go inside, and the
father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening they ring
the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in to
teach them Christian doctrine.’
Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in
Guaraní, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the
curious inversions of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the
daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been
given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or
Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards
figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters
are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting
and simple as that I have transcribed.
Dobrizhoffer, in his history of the Abipones, says of him that he was a
simple Indian, whom often he had seen put in the stocks for petty
faults; at any rate, he seems to have been one of those Indians whom
the Jesuits had at least favourably impressed by the system they
employed. After the manner in which he wrote, hundreds of Indians must
have thought, or else the missions, placed as they were, surrounded on
all sides by enemies, could not have endured a single day. What was it,
then, which raised the Jesuits up so many and so powerful enemies in
Paraguay, when in the districts of the Moxos[217] and the Chiquitos
where their power was to the full as great, amongst the Indians, they
never had a quarrel with the Spaniards till the day they were expelled?
Many and various causes contributed to all they underwent, but most
undoubtedly two reasons must have brought about their fall.
Since the time of Cardenas, the report that the Jesuits had rich mines,
which they worked on the sly, had been persistently on the increase.
Although disproved a thousand times, it still remained; even to-day, in
spite of ‘science’ and its wonderful discoveries, there are many in
Paraguay who cherish dreams of discovering Jesuit mines. Humanity loves
to deceive itself, although there are plenty ready to deceive it; and
if men can both forge for themselves fables and at the same time damage
their neighbours in so doing, their pleasure is intense. I take it that
many really believed the stories of the mines, being unable to credit
that anyone would live far from the world, surrounded but by Indians,
for any other reason than to be rich. But let a country have rich
minerals, even if they exist but in imagination, and it becomes a crime
against humanity to shut it up. So that it would appear one of the
reasons which induced hatred against the Jesuits was the idea that they
had enormous mineral wealth, which either they did not work or else
worked in secret for the benefit of their society.
The other reason was the question of slavery. Once get it well into
your head that you and yours are ‘reasoning men’[218] (_gente de
razon_), and that all coloured people are irrational, and slavery
follows as a natural sequence; for ‘reasoning men’ have wit to make a
gun, and on the gun all reason takes it stand. From the first instant
of their arrival in America, the Jesuits had maintained a firm front
against the enslavement of the Indians. They may have had their faults
in Europe, and in the larger centres of population in America; but
where they came in contact with the Indians, theirs was the sole voice
raised upon their side.
In 1593 Padre Juan Romero, sent from Peru as Superior to Paraguay, on
his arrival gave up an estate (with Indians in _encomienda_) which his
predecessors had enjoyed, alleging that he did not wish to give the
example of making profit out of the unpaid labour of the Indians,[219]
and that without their work the estate was valueless.
On many occasions, notably in the time of Cardenas, the Jesuits openly
withstood all slavery, and amongst the concessions that Ruiz Montoya
obtained from the King of Spain was one declaring all the Indians to be
free.[220] If more examples of the hatred that their attitude on
slavery called forth were wanting, it is to be remembered that in 1640,
when Montoya and Taño returned from Spain, and affixed the edict of the
Pope on the church doors in Piritinanga, threatening with
excommunication all slave-holders, a cry of robbery went forth, and the
Jesuits were banished from the town. But in this matter of slavery
there is no saying what view any one given man will take upon it when
he finds himself in such a country as America was during the time the
Jesuits were in Paraguay. Don Felix de Azara, a liberal and a
philosopher, a man of science, and who has left us perhaps the best
description both of Paraguay and of the River Plate, written in the
eighteenth century, yet was a partisan of slavery.[221] In a most
curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:[222] ‘The Court
ordered Don Francisco, Judge of the High Court of Charcas, to go to
Peru in the character of visitor. The first measure which he took, in
1612, was to order that in future no one should go to the Indians’
houses with the pretext of reducing them (_i.e._, to civilization), and
that no _encomiendas_ (fiefs) should be given of the kind we have
explained—that is to say, with personal service (of the Indians). I
cannot understand on what he could have founded a measure so
politically absurd; but as that judge favoured the _ideas of the
Jesuits_, it is suspected that they dictated his conduct.’
What stronger testimony (coming from such a man) could possibly be
found, both that the Jesuits were opposed to the enslaving of the
Indians and that their opposition rendered them unpopular? In the same
way, no doubt, some modern, unwise philosopher, writing in Brussels,
would uphold the slavery and massacres in Belgian Africa as evidences
of a wise policy, because the end condones the means, and in the
future, when progress has had time to fructify, there will be
workhouses dotted all up and down the Congo, and every ‘native’ will be
forced to supply himself, at but a trifle above the cost in Belgium,
with a sufficiency of comfortable and thoroughly well-seasoned wooden
shoes.
So it appears that the aforesaid were the two chief reasons which made
the Jesuits unpopular with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay. But in
addition it should be remembered that there were in that country
members of almost all the other religious Orders, and that, as nearly
every one of them had quarrelled with the Jesuits in Europe, or at the
best were jealous of their power, the enmities begun in Europe were
transmitted to the New World, and constantly fanned by reports of the
quarrels which went on between the various Orders all through Europe,
and especially in Rome.
But if it were the case that the Jesuits excited feelings of hatred in
their neighbours, yet they certainly had the gift of attaching to
themselves the Indians’ hearts. No institution, condemned with
contumely and thrust out of a country where it had worked for long, its
supposed crimes kept secret, and its members all condemned unheard,
could have preserved its popularity amongst the descendants of the men
with whom it worked, after more than one hundred years have passed, had
this not been the case.
I care not in the least for theories, for this or that dogma of
politicians or theologists, but take my stand on what I heard myself
during my visits to the now ruined Jesuit missions in Paraguay.
Horsemen say horses can go in any shape, and, wonderful as it may seem,
men can be happy under conditions which no writer on political economy
would recognise as fit for human beings. Not once but many times have
aged Indians told me of what their fathers used to say about the
Jesuits, and they themselves always spoke of them with respect and
kindness, and endeavoured to keep up to the best of their ability all
the traditions of the Church ceremonies and hours of prayer which the
Jesuits had instilled.
That the interior system of their government was perfect, or such as
would be suitable for men called ‘civilized’ to-day, is not the case.
That it was not only suitable, but perhaps the best that under all the
circumstances could have been devised for Indian tribes two hundred
years ago, and then but just emerged from semi-nomadism, is, I think,
clear, when one remembers in what a state of misery and despair the
Indians of the _encomiendas_[223] and the _mitas_ passed their lives.
That semi-communism, with a controlling hand in administrative affairs,
produced many superior men, or such as rise to the top in modern times,
I do not think; but, then, who are the men, and by the exercise of what
kind of virtues do they rise in the societies of modern times? The
Jesuits’ aim was to make the great bulk of the Indians under their
control contented, and that they gained their end the complaints
against them by the surrounding population of slave-holders and hunters
after slaves go far to prove.
Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting
their unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the
Jesuits appealed to the Indians; and those two things, by the very
nature of their knowledge of mankind, they knew appealed as much to
Indians as to any other race of men. Firstly (and in this writers
opposed to them, as Brabo[224] and Azara,[225] both agree), they
instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with
missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own
property. And in the second place they told them they were free, and
that they had the King of Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their
freedom, so that they never could be slaves. Neither of these two
propositions commends itself to many writers on the Jesuits in
Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves they were
sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their
neophytes.
The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not
have seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild
rule of the Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed
sufficient to the Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them
above the Indians of the Spanish settlements, who for the most part
passed their lives in slavery.